The ANSSI, French government service in charge of IT security, has published a document (in French) providing brief advice to people having to travel abroad.
The ANSSI advices concerning preparation before travel are as follow:
- Review the applicable company policy,
- Review destination country applicable laws,
- Prefer to use devices dedicated to travel (computers, smartphones, external storage etc.) and not containing any data not strictly needed for the mission,
- Backup all of your data before leaving and keep the backup in a safe place,
- Avoid taking any sensitive data at all, prefer to use a VPN (or a specially set up secured mailbox where all data will be deleted after retrieval) to retrieve the data securely (this is one of the most on-topic pieces of advice, since this one prevents any sensitive data from being present on the computer when crossing the border),
- Use a screen filter to avoid shoulder surfing …