If you are anything like me, you really like your privacy. I don’t like it when people can see my personal information or can follow up and see what I have been doing. Some people are doing things on their computers that they really don’t want people to know about. Whether you are visiting adult sites or sites that can be embarrassing (especially at work!) you’ll want to know how to cover your tracks. But covering your tracks goes beyond your internet usage. Open up Word or Excel on your computer. Go ahead—I’ll wait. Take a look at the menu and see if you can open a recently used file. If you are at all worried about security or sensitive data why allow someone to see what file you were just working on? In fact if you don’t use Word or Excel (or any other program for that matter) you will see files that you may have opened a week or two ago sitting there in your history. This especially important if you are using a shared computer—you work in a shared office environment or you and your spouse or significant other also use the same computer. Let’s walk through a few steps that you can do to erase your tracks and then I’ll show you a few programs that do a more thorough job.

The first and most important thing you can do is erase your history and temporary files in your internet browser. This varies slightly depending on which browser you are using so for this article I am only going to discuss the two most popular ones—Internet Explorer and Firefox. (Every other browser works basically the same!). Read on…

So you want to wipe your hard disk because you plan on selling or giving away your computer? Or you just want to make sure that all your important stuff is really gone. You may have even had a friend who is a “techie” come over and format your hard drive in preparation for installing a new OS. You feel safe, secure, warm, and fuzzy! You feel like everything is OK in the universe—your security is safe. Sorry to burst the bubble you have been living in, but you are more than likely not protected at all! Your personal information is still out there for the world to see—at least someone with the right tools and skills (which believe it or not are easily accessible and many times free!) What to do? Don’t worry, I am going to explain it to you.

To understand the problem you are facing we need a little lesson on how hard drives work. Hard drives are magnetic and the information is stored on very tiny magnetic rods on the surface of the hard drive platters. When the read/write head adds or removes information it aligns these microscopic rods by their poles (north or south). Depending on how the rods are aligned they represent either 1 or 0, binary language. When a file is added the read/write head aligns the rods. When files are deleted the rods are not realigned. The computer simply removes a reference to the file in the File Allocation Table (FAT). The data is still there, it’s just that your computer doesn’t realize it. This is the root of the problem. The FAT table can be rebuilt using easily attainable software and anyone can then see your information.

The solution to this problem is to overwrite the data that has been stored with random characters that are unintelligible and cannot be recovered. But even if you overwrite the data once or even twice the data can still be recovered. The Department of Defense’s policy on hard drive erasure is to overwrite at least three times. The National Security Agency (NSA) prefers to overwrite at least seven times! This makes sure the data is nearly impossible to recover. So what should you do? Ironically the technology to securely wipe your hard drive is already built in to your computer. Hard drive manufacturers started including a technology called Secure Erase in 2001 on all hard drives. Secure Erase is so effective that even the NSA uses the technology. Unfortunately the manufacturers of computer BIOS’s and the OS companies were not as forthcoming. The good news is you can take advantage of this technology. Read on…

You know the drill. You’ve decided to clean up your hard drive to free some space and in the process deleted some files that had some personal information in them. Maybe you had a text file that listed all your passwords and PIN numbers; or you had sensitive banking information in them. Whatever the case, you dragged the files or folders to the recycle bin and then forgot about it. Now you think that your information is deleted forever and will never be seen by anyone else ever again. WRONG ANSWER! In reality all you have done is erase a entry in the computer’s memory that points to the actual file location. You have not erased a single thing.

What? Your files and personal data are still on your computer’s hard drive? Absolutely! You, or anyone else for that matter, can download absolutely free software to recover those files. Let’s take a brief examination of the file-writing and erasing procedures for your computer to better help you understand just exactly what is going on.

When you write something on your hard drive you are writing in a series of 1’s and 0’s. This is called binary language. If you were to examine the hard drive under a microscope you won’t actually see these 1’s and 0’s but would see very tiny magnetic “rods” that are aligned by either north or south to represent the binary language. When you computer’s hard drive writes data it aligns these “rods” with either their north or south poles up to indicate 1’s and 0’s. I know, very technical stuff, but important to know. Read on…

In recent months and years the term “phishing” has become more and more popular. But you are probably wondering just what is it? In the simplest terms, phishing is an attempt by a third-party to defraud you by gaining access to your sensitive user data, credit card information, passwords, or any other sensitive data. Usually the attack will appear to be completely legitimate! This is why phishing is so scary. You have already been a victim of phishing but didn’t even realize it. The term phishing was first used over ten years ago and is a play on the words phreaking and fishing (phreaking is a term related to people who would experiment with phone lines and phone technology for experimental and even fraudulent uses). The bottom line is someone is phishing for your information!

You have probably gotten an email in the past few months from purporting to be from either eBay, PayPal, maybe even your bank telling you that they need to verify your information and to please follow this link to log in. The problem is that the fraudsters have exactly duplicated the appearance of the other website on their servers and are now waiting for you to login so they can gain access to your username and password! The result is that now a thief will have the ability to log into your REAL account and take your money, ruin your reputation, and even gain personal information that they can use to open new accounts and credit cards. It is the modern-age equivalent to purse-snatching!

This is a very real problem and something that you must face or it will end up hurting you! What can you do to prevent being a victim of phishing? Here are a few easy steps to take: Read on…