Archive : Miscellaneous tools

Today I’ve tested a less known security tool, Patriot NG 1.1 from www.security-projects.com. Maybe the program is less known because it’s in spanish, not translated yet in english, though all the options and settings are very easy to understand for a native english speaker. The program resides in the system tray, from where you can get access to its main options via context menu-right click. The Control Panel named in spanish “Panel De Control” is very simple and intuitive [...]

In the past, the data loss or data leakage was a big concern for big or medium companies but nowadays when we are witnessing an exponential growth of commercial espionage and the fight for “the market” become so intense between competitors, the data loss prevention is of utmost importance for absolutely all the companies, bigger or smaller. A  data leakage from within the company has direct and indirect consequences, direct as  data usage by your competitors and indirect as loss of [...]

Have you ever wonder, how data recovery software works ? I mean, everybody knows, when you delete files them are going to a special folder Recycle Bin, but what is happening when you empty Recycle Bin ? To understand this we must first understand how data are stored on storage devices e.g. hard drives. I don’t want to write a very “technical” article, instead I will try to keep it as simple as I can. The most commonly file system formats used in modern Microsoft Windows based systems [...]

It’s interesting what vision has PC users with not a lot of experience about their antivirus, how they feel about that software. It’s more about a feeling, yes, they perceive the antivirus like a comrade who defend them fighting back against all kind of nasty malware and zombies for their safety and peace, look how people speak about their antivirus :  “my antivirus says this or says that…” Well, if it’s about a comparison between an antivirus and a bodyguard [...]

These days, when many software vendors are ready to do anything to increase  their incomes, including embedding adware and other unwanted programs in their products for advertising and marketing purposes, to analyse a program carefully before to run it, it’s a normal and desirable behaviour  install it fully in the computer. I’m  talking about less-known  programs, sometimes spreaded as freeware, sometimes advertised as program that will do “miracles” in the computer and [...]

TrueCrypt The so called “on-the-fly” encryption, is a method for encrypting and decrypting the files in RAM memory and only when them are used, as a consequence all the files on your encrypted partition or drive are permanently encrypted with an algorithm at your choice : AES-256, Serpent or Twofish. Can be used for any partition on your harddisk or for a storage device like an USB flash drive. It can creates a hidden volume or hidden Operating System that nobody knows it exists on [...]

This little application–Sandboxie–  create a virtual environment(think at virtualization provided by VMware) in your PC, where you can run your browser, install an applications or run an executable without to makes permanent changes on your harddisk. The programs are able to run normally because they have read access to any file in your PC, only writing procedure is intercepted by Sandboxie and redirected in a safe place on harddisk in a sandbox. No real files,  folders or registries [...]