With identity theft on the rise and more parts of our lives moving to the computer, it is becoming increasingly important to protect our data. Most people are familiar with encryption and the idea of an encrypted file means that someone without the password cant tell what the encrypted file is, but few know that there are still ways to tell what is in those encrypted files.
If you have a hidden encrypted file but then un-encrypt it to view or change it, Windows will load the file in Ram memory, but if you are out of Ram, the file will be written to the hard drive. Swap file and paging files are some of the few ways Windows saves files and although you may think the file is not there, it is until it is overwritten. This is one way how forensic computer science works, it can be tedious but with proper tools, recovering secret files on computers is pretty easy for someone who knows what they are doing.
Telling people this is a double edged sword, I want the people who have a legit reason to hide their personal info to know this but I don’t want predators and thieves to know this. Windows Vista Ultimate and Vista Enterprise as well as the newest version of TrueCrypt offer what is known as full drive encryption. Full drive encryption means your whole C system drive is encrypted when you turn your computer on and off and everything within the drive is encrypted on the fly. Assuming you have a good password, someone looking anywhere on your C drive will see a blog of data with no apparent pattern. Windows Vista calls this BitLocker Drive Encryption which requires a new type of motherboard with TPM which saves a file on it or requires a USB key to boot your computer. TrueCrypt makes you create a CD. This makes any attempt of data recovery on your hard drive useless unless you create too simple of a password.
In order to keep your encrypted drive from being unlocked, you must come up with a strong password that cant be guess and when looked at appears to be random characters. The best way to do this is create your own algorithm that you will remember. Something like remember a long word or phrase but swap every other letter with a number and add 5 on one, multiply by 5 on the next, divide by 5, subtract 5 and so forth. You could do this for the letters too, when you want to spell "a" in a phrase, add 5 letters which is "f." When doing it for the number part, when you need the letter "a" and if it is at the beginning of the phrase, start at 0 and add 5, so you would put the number 5. Try not to do things like add 5 every other password because 5,a,10,b,15 is a pretty easy repetition. You could do something like add 3 and multiply by 2 every time which will give you different numbers every time with less of a pattern. Can you tell I am passionate about the subject? Sorry for rambling on…