Top 9 Best Windows Encryption Software – Securing your data for peace of mind

Encryption software comes in many varieties and can be a real minefield for the newcomer to encryption.

Encryption, also known as cryptography, can be used to secure files on your hard drive or partition of your hard drive if you have specifically partitioned your hard drive. There are solutions to encrypt email where you would be looking for public key encryption (PKI) as well as on-the-fly (OTFE) encryption solutions for when you need to do encrypt a one-off file.

Another type of encryption, known as steganography, takes your plain text and hides it in images or sound and video files effectively making it invisible.

How do you decide which software you need if you’re new to this? This is a complex subject but there are a few pointers that will prepare you when reviewing the possible solutions.

The first thing to look for in a solution is some detail about the level of encryption provided. If someone says that their encryption solution provides ‘very strong encryption’ or ‘high level encryption’ but don’t tell you anything about the algorithm used you should be wary of it.

Strong and high level don’t really tell you anything. If someone tells you that they provide 128-bit or 256-bit encryption you know what they are providing. There is a good basis to their solution.

Generally speaking, the publicly available encryption solutions including the many open source versions have been better tested and their good and not so good features well known.

Some of the better known algorithms in use include AES-256, Serpent, Twofish, Rjindael AES,

The big benefit of disk encryption is that it protects data on the hard drive even when the computer is switched off or when the hard drive is removed from the computer and someone tries to read it. This is opposed to any type of security enforced by the windows operating system access permissions which require the computer to be powered up.

If someone stole a computer secured in this way and removed the hard drive from it they could attach it to their own computer and read everything on the drive. They wouldn’t need the username and password details that the owner of the stolen computer needed to boot it up.

Windows encryption software encrypts data on the hard drive and automatically decrypts it without any user impact when an authorised user requests it. Apart from supplying the username and password to get into the system initially no other action is required to work normally on an encrypted computer.

There have been several very high profile instances reported where very sensitive data has been lost by someone leaving a laptop on a train or back seat of their car. These cases in particular have now made the whole subject of encrypting laptops with some sort of windows encryption software almost standard practice.

Although these cases have generally involved large organisations or in some cases government departments, loss of data of any sort can have a significant impact on any organisation or private individual.

Protecting your data is something that everyone should consider. Your insurances cover the cost of replacing your hardware, and you may have back-ups of your data held elsewhere but if your sensitive information got into the wrong hands what could be the impact on your business?

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Top 9 Best Windows Encryption Software – Securing your data for peace of mind:

AXCRYPT

AxCrypt is a simple file encryption software for Windows. It integrates seamlessly with your workflow to encrypt, decrypt, store, send and work with files.

AXCRYPT

GPG4WIN

Gpg4win supports both relevant cryptography standards, OpenPGP and S/MIME (X.509), and is the official GnuPG distribution for Windows. It is maintained by the developers of GnuPG. Gpg4win and the software included with Gpg4win are Free Software (Open Source; among other things free of charge for all commercial and non-commercial purposes).

GPG4WIN

CYPHERIX

Cypherix builds award winning, drag and drop personal data encryption software and network security tools for individual and corporate users who require elegant easy-to-use data encryption software products.

CYPHERIX

KRYPTEL

Kryptel produces not just an “encrypted file”; its files are containers that may contain thousands of files and folders. Sometimes you might want to decrypt a few files only, or just peek inside. Kryptel Browser is an Explorer-like tool, which lets you browse a Kryptel container and view or edit the files it contains.