This article will talk about:
- Protecting your coumputer
- Password protection and storage
- Email protection
- Disk protection
Digital technology is awesome, it is so awesome that you usually want to take it with you everywhere, even when travelling abroad on business or holiday. But, as everybody knows, when travelling things can easily disappear, usually because of some malignant character that was in the area, as in stealing. And it is always irritating when you suddenly find out that someone nicked your bag with the digital music player, laptop and camera in it! Not only that, but then you realise all the precious info you had in it. Your 30GB music collection, all those priceless pictures or even worse, all your private data on the laptop! Not to talk about the value you’ll have to claim from your insurance company (because you were insured).
Even if you can’t protect your stuff from getting stolen the moment you take it out of your house (and even there it isn’t safe); you can protect your information from being abused. Especially with netbooks becoming so popular lately, and public wifi blooming all over the place, it is very tempting to take your laptop everywhere in order to always have access to your information, either online or offline.
Fortunately only a few simple, free and easy to use tools are required to assure once privacy is maintained no matter where we are.
Of course basic security is mandatory, especially if you are going to surf those open wifi networks, an updated internet browser, a good anti virus program and a firewall are a must! Simple things like a log-in password and good passwords on all Internet services are aslo equally as
important. Just following those basic guidelines should be enough for most people. But you can take it one step further as well:
Don’t write down your passwords, click them! You are sitting in a coffee shop, with your laptop and a latté on the table, you open you browser and log on your web mail. Meanwhile some guy is sitting next to you and looks at your computer. He might see you email address on the screen and could even find out your password is by looking at the keys your typing.
That is where Keepass comes in. Not only it helps you remember all your passwords for the 50+ social sites you have to check in while traveling, but it also works as a automatic log-on by just clicking on their respective links so that no key logger or snooper can see what the password really is.
Using an email client on your computer will also help avoiding having to log on every time you have to check your mail. Plus with imap becoming pretty common for most mail services nowadays, it is a lot easier to just download just the headers of the new mails and check the ones you really need to read here and now. Thunderbird is of course the one I recommend as it is open source and versatile. And for added security it is even possible to encrypt all emails!
PGP, or Pretty Good Privacy is a very powerful instrument to guaranty one’s privacy. You can get it for Thunderbird by installing the Enigmail add-on.
It is important to understand that sending a regular email is like sending a regular postcard, anyone can read its content as it is not protected at all. PGP is based on trust. You create an encryption that contains two keys. One is your private key, that is password protected and stays on your computer. The other one is a public key, that you can publish anywhere on the net. When you want to send an email to a friend, you need to have his public key and he needs yours. You must both trust that you have the right public key and not a fraud, then you just need to encrypt your mail with your private key and his public key, and your friend can decrypt it with his private key and your public key.
This a highly powerful tool is actually the only safe and efficient way to keep your email 99% private! (Pretty Good as in not Complete Privacy). And yet it is so little used. There is a small learning curve, but with some dedication it can be learned in a very short time. And Enigmail has also a pretty good tutorial if you need to learn it by yourself to convince your friends that no one is safe from Big Borther.
But this only protects the computer from digital intrusions, not from physical ones. That is where Truecrypt comes in. As with most things on this blog, it is a free and open source program, and quite a powerful one at that! Its latest version can encrypt a whole disk drive with Windows on it. I tried this on my netbook while I was testing Windows7 on it, and it worked perfectly on my drive that was partitioned in two. It created an extra log-in while booting up (which can be easily camouflaged as a system error for example) and it encrypts the whole disk so that even if someone pulls out the disk from the computer and access’s it through other systems, it is still encrypted and inaccessible. This extra layer, which only makes the PC a tiny (if noticeable) bit slower, can guaranty that no one can access the disk if the computer is lost or stolen.
Well, that is…
Almost.
Posted on March 15, 2010
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