What is encryption?
Basically, it is the process of condensing and converting data into a format in order to ensure against data access of unauthorized individuals. This technology has always been popular with government operations. Nowadays, you can use data encryption software in order to ensure your computer’s security against hackers and viruses.
Who Encrypts Their Data?
In order to ensure their data security, companies would adopt encryption measures. Data are encrypted first before they are transferred via the internet. Corporate executives’ emails are also encrypted in order to protect vital and sensitive information that these emails might contain. User-friendly softwares have been designed to help people encrypt information being sent out. The process of encrypting emails has been adopted by all sorts of companies, even hotels and restaurants. These give them additional protection against hackers in addition to scanners and firewalls already installed in their system.
People who are also using wireless local area network (WLAN) also use encryption methods in order to protect their computer drives, programs and folders against malicious hacking. It is very important that you ensure your computer’s security especially if you are regularly accessing the Internet and sending or receiving files through it.
Data encryption is also important when you store files in a multiple-user computer. It is also advisable to use encryption methods when you are transferring data through CDs, floppy disks, USBs, and other devices.
Choosing Your Data Encryption Software
When choosing a software for data encryption, security of your system is the primary consideration. However, the kind of software would depend on the level of your security need. If you are involved in regular transfer of highly classified and confidential files, you should consider a highly technical and sophisticated encryption and security software than you would use with your regular emails.
Large companies whose executives are conscious of their competition would opt for these stringent classes of encryption software. The government also adopts encryption softwares that are of high quality. Encryptions on these types of software are basically of advanced algorithms. They also adopt numerous password combinations.
When purchasing encryption software, you should check if it has passed the AES standards. This is to assure you that the software is safe to use and that the user would be well protected by it. If you don’t want to spend a dime in these encryption software or you think that you don’t need them, you might still consider downloading one for free. As long as you get those that are popularly known for their reliability, you can have some form of security against hackers or saboteurs. Admittedly, these softwares are not as good as those highly sophisticated ones used by the government or large companies; however, they would serve as a good deterrent against hackers.
Methods of Encryption
There are various kinds of data encryption. These include:
a. Single file encryption.
b. Folder encryption.
c. Volume encryption.
d. Whole disk encryption.
e. Email encryption.
If your computer is operating under an XP Operating System, you could take advantage of its file and folder encryption capabilities. This data encryption system is relatively secure. However, you should be careful about using this since an encrypted file that you have sent out may have not been encrypted in the beginning. In this sense, the file is still unsecured.
What to Take Note of When Encrypting Files
You should be careful when you move or copy encrypted files. If an encrypted file is copied in an NTFS volume, the encryption remains intact. Otherwise, it would be decrypted. It is also important to note that even if the file is encrypted, it does not necessarily mean that it would still be encrypted when you send it out.
Nice Article. You may also want to include link encryption and even network-wide encryption. You touched on it a bit with email encryption but many companies move data around with applications other than email and are prone to the same vulnerabilities.
Link encryption has often been looked down on by network people because the exchanging of encryption keys between the source and destination forced a static path or tunnel through the network, The network folks do not like this because many applications such as Voice over IP (VoIP) perform best when the network can route packets dynamically. Encryption also becomes very complicated when more than a few links are encrypted. Fortunately, there are now technologies available that allow all the traffic on the network to be encrypted without impacting applications and without increasing network complexity.
With this new technology companies can easily encrypt all of their traffic on the network making it immune to hacking, intrusion or inspection.