PC Paranoia - Part 1

Kai Chandler looks at computer privacy. Part One of Three

Unless you have an exhibitionist streak, you won't want the world to know your business - whether on the PC or the Internet.

Did you know that:

most of the screens you view on the Internet, whether text, images or a mixture, are stored on your PC? Anyone with a bit of know-how can trawl through these files to see what you've visited. Not only that but they also take up valuable space.

or that files called cookies record details of many of the web sites that your visit?

and that files can be restored and examined, even after being deleted?

Of course if you are the only person with access to your PC, then you won't suffer sleepless nights over the points above, but what if you have to put your PC in for a service? Do you want the service engineer to have access to your shares portfolio or read your letters to Mum?

In this three-part series, we look at PC privacy, Internet privacy and review a low cost shareware tool to automate PC cleanup.

Part One focuses on PC privacy.

Deleted files can be restored.

You may think that deleting a file removes it from your system. Well it doesn't. It puts it in the Recycle Bin which is just a folder like any other. You can restore files simply by double-clicking the Recycle Bin icon on your desktop and selecting files to restore.

You may think that emptying the Recycle Bin will finally delete the files but it doesn't. It just marks the disk space as free so they will eventually be overwritten. There's a host of tools that will restore files from this position.

To delete the file securely you need a wiper program that overwrites the space on your disk with garbage characters. Shareware Mutilate File Wiper should do the trick. Costing $20 it has several levels of security and can overwrite free space. Alternatively, McAfee Utilities contains the McAfee Shredder wipe program.

Using passwords

Enough to deter the casual Peeping Tom, a password will add a layer of security around a file. Most programs have password functionality. For example when saving a document in Microsoft Word 2000, you just File | Save As, select Tools, then General Options and enter a password. You'll be prompted to confirm the password by entering it a second time.

Alternatively, you can secure an entire folder with WinZip or a program such as PGP (short for Pretty Good Privacy) also supplied as part of McAfee Utilities.

A word of caution though. A password is only as good as the number of attempts that need to be made to guess it. There are password crackers for most programs including WinZip, so you should use long complex passwords to make the time to crack so long that it's not worth bothering. Don't forget to make your password difficult to guess - click <here> for hints on how to do this.

The Documents List

You may not want to reveal what documents or image files you've viewed recently. If not, then you should clear your Documents list. To see the list, just select Documents from the Start menu.

To clear the evidence using Windows Me, you should select Settings from the Start menu, then select Taskbar and Start Menu. Select Advanced and then Clear. Other versions of Windows have similar functions.

Many applications such as Word also store recently used documents in the File menu. After use, simply open several innocuous documents to clear your documents from the list. There's also a list of most recently used files that appears in the File Open dialogue. To clear this, at least for Office 2000, you should use Windows Explorer to delete the entries in the C:\Windows\Application Data\Microsoft\Office\Recent folder. The actual documents or files themselves are not removed, only the references or pointers to them.

Part Two examines how to clear up the traces after using the Internet.

Part Three looks at Window Washer

 

Kai Chandler reviews top tools for family friendly surfing at www.surfcontrols.com