Protecting Your Data, and Data Security
~ by John Galvin,
John's
Newsletter
How would you feel about somebody stealing your
computer, and reading all your personal files? Any credit card information
on your computer? Old love letters? Client information? It would not
be nice to have any
of this information stolen.
Fortunately, it is easy enough to protect your data. PGP (Pretty Good
Privacy) is a free program, which will allow you to encrypt your data,
making it "almost" impossible for anyone to retrieve, except you. PGP is
available at
http://www.pgpi.org/
One problem with encryption, is that if someone is searching your hard
drive, they can find your encrypted files, and can start guessing passwords.
To be even safer, you could use steganography to hide the data in another
file. So your favorite song, might contain you credit card information, or a
list of your passwords, and the only person who will know, is you.
Software which encrypts your data, and hides your data at the same time,
can be found at
http://www.steganos.com
The following site, gives a good explanation of how steganography
works:
http://www.vb-helper.com/steganography.htm
EDITOR'S NOTE: For another
alternative to hiding files in Windows 9X/ME without encryption, check out
Lock&Hide, created by our own
Vic Ferri.
What if you want to delete data? Well simply deleting it from Windows, is
not enough. The file will simply disappear into the Recycle Bin. Emptying
the Recycle Bin will delete the file...won't it? No it won't. It simply
tells Windows to ignore the file. It is still on your hard-drive, and will
remain there until you overwrite it with data. The file just doesn't show up
in Windows. So, for all intents and purposes, the file is deleted, unless it
is a sensitive file, and it really must be deleted in the true sense of the
word. The following program allows you to recover deleted data:
Restoration--freeware
http://hccweb1.bai.ne.jp/~hcj58401/
It clearly doesn't take a professional to recover "deleted" data, so what
can you do about it. Well fortunately, there are plenty of programs out
there, that will properly delete your files for you. Some of these are
freeware, and one such program, is simply called Eraser, and is
available from
www.tolvanen.com/eraser
Eraser overwrites sensitive files up to 35 times, making the data
unrecoverable to the average professional trying to retrieve the data.
It may still be possible to retrieve data, however only by people/companies
with huge resources. It would basically involve bringing the hard drive into
a clean room, and analyzing it under a
microscope. Not an easy thing to do at all. You may wonder how on earth data
can be recovered if it has been overwritten with more data. Well take
this analogy. You have a rubber stamp with the letter A on it, and you stamp
it on a page. You then get a rubber stamp with the letter B on it, and stamp
it over the A. Even though the letter is B, if you look closely enough, you
can make out the letter A underneath it.
A list of other disk cleaners is available here:
http://www.tucows.com/system/diskc95.html
The safest way to delete data, for the ultra paranoid, is to use different
eraser tools on the disk, then take the disk out of the computer and cut it
up using an angle grinder, and disposing it in the local garbage dump.
In my newsletter, I will go into much more detail about data security, while
still presenting it in an easy-to-understand manner. I will show you how to
write webpages, how to program using Perl/Javascript/C/Java, as well as
showing you how to trace spammers, and lots more.
John Galvin is the owner of John's
Newsletter.
To subscribe, send an email to
johnsnewsletter@freelists.org with 'subscribe' in the subject line.
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