Obviously, you do need to protect files containing bank statements, credit-card information, and Social Security numbers - basic data about your personal identity. We’ll assume that neither the NSA nor criminals are really interested in your collection of cat photos or your daughter’s term papers. Which files should be encrypted and where? (And you must ensure that unprotected bits of those files don’t remain on your hard drive.) You also need to protect the encryption key with a long, complex password that’s extremely difficult to crack - and be wary of phishing scams and other deceits that might trick you into handing over the key. Going back to that house analogy, encrypting sensitive files is like locking your front door - a reasonable and generally sufficient line of defense. That doesn’t mean you shouldn’t take precautions. But it reserves the hard work for the few people of interest. It might soak up everyone’s cellphone metadata because that’s relatively easy. Even the NSA, which has the ability to crack all but the best encryption, probably won’t bother. It takes a lot of time and skill to crack encryption, and most criminals are looking for an easy score. To a large extent, the same rules apply to data. Few of us have anything in our homes that would attract the sort of professional thieves who might steal a Van Gogh. Why? Well, for one thing, you can’t afford it. But your security system most likely doesn’t match those used by New York’s Metropolitan Museum of Art or the Getty Center in Los Angeles. You might have an alarm system or even bars on the windows. You probably keep your front door locked - at least at night and when you’re away. I will recommend two file-encryption programs that might take TrueCrypt’s place. In this follow-up article, I’ll discuss my own approach to protecting sensitive files, and I’ll explain why I - unlike Susan - typically don’t recommend Microsoft’s BitLocker. It had dubious legal foundations, its developers were unknown, and its support was primarily relegated to forums that are now missing.” In last week’s (June 12) Top Story, “The life and untimely demise of TrueCrypt,” Susan Bradley reviewed the application’s history and stated, “It’s a mystery that we gave TrueCrypt such an extraordinary level of trust. So did I.īut now that the popular disk-encryption app is effectively dead - at least for the foreseeable future - it’s time to look for a replacement. It seems as if everyone who kept sensitive files secure did it with TrueCrypt. TOP STORY Data-encryption alternatives to TrueCrypt
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