Thread: Steganos Safe 2008 v 10.1

As we grow to rely more and more on our PCs to store sensitive information
that we would not want strangers (and sometimes even friends) to know about, security becomes a priority. Identity theft is the most prolific of all cyber crimes as personal information like ones name, birth date and mother's maiden name are easily stolen from files, along with work-related files that you wouldn't want competitors to see. Safe 2008, the latest release from Steganos, is an upgrade from the 2007 version. It comes with many new features and three main applications-Safe, Portable Safe and Shredder.

Features
The guiding principle behind Safe is the creation of a virtual folder in the form of a SLE file, Safe's propriety format. This file is encrypted using a complex algorithm which is hard to break, and it can be placed anywhere. Since a device can hold multiple safes, that is several SLE files, you can set up as many of these safe drives as you like, each with a maximum ceiling of 256 GB.

To open a closed safe you need to enter the password-and this can be a string of characters or a combination of pictures. If you are not good at remembering passwords, then there is an alternative available-set up your USB stick as a key, so that the safe opens automatically whenever the stick is inserted into the USB port, as if the key opens the lock to a safe. New features includes moving your Outlook Express and Windows Mail e-mail into a virtual drive.



Performance
Creating a secure drive with Safe is not too tricky. Start by clicking the 'Create' button, represented as a safe with a plus sign on it, which lets you setup a new secure drive or use an existing secure drive. Enter a name and drive letter for your new secure drive. Then, select the drive and define the drive space to secure.
The password for the secure drive can be user input, PicPass, or generated. When generating the password, the user can set the number of characters, and whether to use numbers, special characters, and upper or lower case letters.

A quality bar indicates the security of the password from 'This password doesn't provide any significant security' for zero characters to 'This password cannot be identified by the secret service' for 100 characters. Pic Pass is especially suited for people who are good at memory visualization. The PicPass window has two categories for the pictures-Photos and Symbol images.

Setting up a portable safe on a USB stick drive was a little trickier. It did not work jn the beginning and instead threw up an error. It turns out that the machine's antivirus program needs to be disabled before trying to create a portable safe, and the easiest way to do this is to run 'msconfig' and disable the service. After this step, you can set up your portable safe in the same way as you create a secure drive using Safe.

Shredder has two main components. The file shredder, which destroys files and folders currently on the hard drive, and the 'Free Space Shredder', which destroys the remnants of previously deleted files. 'Data destruction' has three methods of data shredding-the first is to completely overwrite the data, and thus is the fastest method. The second method requires more time using 'Multiple Overwriting' and rises up to the standards of the US Department of Defense. The last is the Gutmann method and is extremely slow.

FOR: Easy and secure drive created fast, encrypt your private data and emails. AGAINST: It could offer more security, and its performance is a little sluggish.