Episode 8: 2 Reasons Why You SHOULD Encrypt Folders
Cyber Security For All
Shownotes Transcript
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In this episode, we are going to talk about Encrypting your sensitive files on your computer.
Whether you are on a pc or mac, you have the ability to encrypt and password protect folders on your computer. This is a really neat feature that doesn’t cost anything and adds an additional layer of security on your computer. If you want to be super safe, you can encrypt your entire hard drive, but for the purposes of today’s topic, we are going to focus on just encrypting a folder.
What is folder encryption? Folder encryption is pretty simple. You pick a folder on your computer, or create a new one. You then follow the simple steps to encrypt a folder.
https://www.comparitech.com/blog/vpn-privacy/encrypt-windows-files/).
https://itsfoss.com/password-protect-folder-linux/
What this does is it scrambles the information stored in that folder and only a password can unencrypt it. Whenever you want to access the information in that folder, you’ll be prompted to enter a password. If you forget that password, then the content of that folder are gone forever. Because of this you’ll want to make sure you pick a strong, safe, but easy to remember password. Feel free to listen or watch one of our previous episodes where we discuss how to create a password. If anyone were to ever physically gain access to your computer, they can’t see the contents because they don’t have the password. If they try to copy the folder to a different computer, they will not be able to see the data either because the values are encrypted and will not assemble the appropriate data without the key, which is the password.
But, why would you want to encrypt a folder? Well, there’s a couple of reasons. First, you may want to consider encrypting a folder on your computer that contains sensitive information. This information could be things like tax information, confidential information, or something as simple as pictures. The information encrypted is typically something you don’t want someone else getting their hands on. Companies encrypt entire hard drives because they don’t want any of their proprietary information being leaked. Similar idea, but specific to a folder only.
Next, you may want to encrypt a folder because even if you delete files from your computer, they aren’t really deleted unless you perform a proper hard drive deletion or destruction. If you ever sell your computer, or if someone gains physical access to your hard drive, encrypting folders allows you to rest assured that your data is unreadable by anyone else.
But just because you encrypted your data, it doesn’t mean that it’s 100% secure. An algorithm was used to encrypt your data, which means that if someone figures out the algorithm used, they could potentially reverse engineer it. If you write down your password and keep it close to your desk, or if someone finds it, well it doesn’t matter that you encrypted your folder at that point.
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