Data security software: Steganos Security Suite
- — 16 December, 2003 07:44
Steganos Security Suite is a collection of tools that promises to keep your data safer than the crown jewels. Steganos Safe creates a secured area on your hard drive, up to 1.2GB in size, which shows up as a virtual hard drive in Windows Explorer. Any data moved to it is automatically encrypted. Once you have copied across all your important files, simply ‘close’ the safe. The information remains inaccessible until unlocked with your password.
Portable Safe uses the same technology to enable you to secure data burned onto a CD or DVD-ROM. The data gets copied onto the disc along with the decryption software, so it is unreadable on any other computer without the password. If you don’t want to encrypt entire volumes then Steganos File Manager allows you to set encryption options for individual files.
The E-mail Encryption tool saves the contents of an e-mail as a self-extracting encrypted file. Provided the recipient knows the password and is running Windows, they will be able to open the file and read its contents. Of course, any encrypted data is only as secure as your password, and a handy function tells you how secure your password is and how likely it is to be cracked.
These data encryption utilities will be most useful to businesses, but there are three tools ideal for home users. The Password Manager provides a secure environment for you to keep track of online passwords, PIN numbers and so on. Internet Trace Destructor covers your tracks by destroying your browser’s history and cache files. It also gets rid of cookies and protects some desktop functions such as the recently used files list and the Recycle Bin. The final tool, Steganos Shredder, erases files so they can’t be retrieved by data recovery utilities (see here for a screenshot).
Steganos Security Suite is a powerful set of encryption and data protection tools that’s extremely easy to use.
In brief: Steganos Security Suite 5.0
Price: $US45
Vendor: Steganos
URL: www.steganos.com
