Have you given much thought to the safety of your data? I am sure that many of you have passwords on your phones and computers. But what does it really protect? One of our clients asked us this question at our Apple Mac and laptop repair London centre recently. That is what we are going to discuss here today.

Password

You will be surprised that all your effort devising and then remembering a long and complex password has very little real protection. Imagine that you have a key to a house. The door has a very good lock and you are the only person who possesses the key. When you decide to walk around the house and you notice that the walls have gaping holes instead of windows. It’s a sad view, isn’t it? Well, in the cyber world there is, in fact, no walls at all. Unless your preventive measures went further than a password, almost anyone who wants to access your data will encounter no difficulties in succeeding. The interface of an operating system is the only thing that protects your data. If you take the hard drive out and plug it into a different system with its own interface all the information becomes accessible. All because there are no such restrictions in intruder’s system.

Encryption

How do I protect my data? Encryption is one of the tools. A drive encryption tool is something that takes all your data on any particular drive and makes it completely unreadable to anyone but you. Encryption is the process of protecting data by using an algorithm to scramble it. Mac Os offers free software, FileVault, which  you can access through Apple menu > System Preferences > Security & Privacy. Windows Vista and later offers free software as well. However, you have to have a licence for Pro version or higher (only Enterprise and Ultimate for Windows Vista and 7). But there are free alternatives such as DiskCryptor or VeraCrypt. The later one is supported on almost any widely available operating system.

However, the strength of encrypting software is also its weakness. If you forget the password… Lasciate ogne speranza, voi ch’intrate*

^{*Abandon all hope, you who enter here. Dante.}