DESTROYING THE EVIDENCE

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With the major music companies using their financial muscle to sue anyone caught trading files illegally, the final step in protecting your computer and yourself involves wiping out any evidence that you’ve ever had questionable files stored on your computer at all. Two ways to hide your questionable files from view are encryption and secure deletion.

ENCRYPTING YOUR FILES

Encryption basically scrambles your files so no one can tell what type of data may have been stored inside them. To make encryption easy to use, programs such as the following ones can automatically encrypt everything in a folder:

Encrypted Magic Folders http://www.pc-magic.com

CryptoExpert http://www.secureaction.com

To use any files stored in an encrypted folder, you enter a password. When you’re ready to leave your computer, just enter your password again, and these programs magically encrypt your folders once more, protecting the folder and file contents from prying eyes.

SECURELY DELETING YOUR FILES

In addition to encryption, consider securely deleting your files when you don’t need them anymore. Encrypted files can still be cracked, but deleted files can never be used as evidence if their contents can’t be recovered.

When you delete a file, use a secure deletion method. When you delete files in the normal way, your computer doesn’t physically erase the file from your hard disk—it just erases part of the file name and marks the space that the file used on the disk as blank so that it can be used for something else. As far as your operating system knows, the file no longer exists, but with a simple utility program, such as Norton Utilities, you can recover previously deleted files rather quickly if they haven’t yet been written over.

On the other hand, secure deletion programs erase the file from a hard disk and then rewrite random data over that area of the hard disk several times. The more times you write random data over a file, the harder it will be for anyone to recover that file ever again.

Here are some popular secure deletion programs:

AbsoluteShield File Shredder http://www.sys-shield.com

Mutilate File Wiper http://home.att.net/~craigchr/mutilate.html

CyberScrub http://www.cyberscrub.com

Autoclave http://staff.washington.edu/jdlarios/autoclave

Protecting your computer from viruses and other threats requires vigilance, but armed with the proper tools, you can protect most of your file sharing activities from interfering with your regular data. However, no matter how many precautions you take, or how careful you may be, every time you connect to the Internet, you’re putting your computer and data at risk. Although you can protect your computer using a variety of tools and techniques, none can guarantee true security, so be aware of the dangers whenever you engage in any type of file sharing.

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