Emergency Destruction of Cryptocontainers
There are situations when you need to urgently destroy a cryptocontainer containing valuable information. You may have a backup from which you can restore it later, or the situation simply requires immediate destruction of the data without the possibility of recovery in the future. There are several solutions to this task.
The simplest solution is to take the key file to a microSD card and, if necessary, physically destroy it. Remember when we created the cryptocontainer, in addition to the password, we also added a key file? Where did you save it? Probably on your hard drive; now you just need to transfer it to the microSD card and securely delete the original file using the secure deletion method discussed in the chapter dedicated to data deletion.
When securely destroying the microSD card, for example by burning it, recovering data from the cryptocontainer will be virtually impossible. Of course, this is unless you have a backup of the key file somewhere in the cloud or an alternative storage.
Among the downsides of this method, one might note the cost of the microSD card and the risk of not completely destroying it, as well as the fact that the cryptocontainer itself remains unaffected and can be discovered by malicious actors. The advantages of this method include its simplicity: going to the store, buying a microSD card, and then transferring the key file to it is not a particularly difficult task.
The second option is the Panic Button. This is a special program for the emergency destruction of data and alerting about unauthorized access to the device. In this case, we are only interested in the emergency destruction of data.
You need to download and install the program. During the initial installation, at the "Data Deletion" stage, add the cryptocontainer and any other files you would like to destroy to the list of files to be deleted.