If you are a Windows user, you often use the Office Suite to write documents, prepare presentations or do some financial calculations. Sensitive documents can be given a degree of protection using Office built-in encryption. Microsoft offers several features to help restrict access to documents through the use of passwords or encryption.

If encryption is enabled, the document is scrambled with an encryption code, making the contents of it unreadable to anyone who does not have the password required to decrypt the document. There are several encryption algorithms available for use with Word, Excel, and PowerPoint files. Continue Reading »

When using a public network, such as an open wireless hot-spot, the potential security risk is that your conversations can be sniffed by other malicious users. Encrypting your communication is most likely the best solution; however most Internet users will find it too tedious to setup.

In this hack, we will show you how to tunnel Google Talk instant messaging client over SSH. We will create a secure communication tunnel from our computer, over an insecure network to a trusted remote server. This hack is for both Mac OS X and Windows users. Continue Reading »

Managing multiple passwords is complex. Internet users often have too many passwords to remember. Each password may expire on a different schedule and be subject to different policies about password composition. This complexity lads people to give up and select trivial passwords, or even worse, use one password for everything.

Sxipper is a free Firefox browser extension, developed by Sxip, that lets you log into any web site with a single click. It saves time by keeping track of all of your user names, passwords and personal data you share every day. Sxipper improves online security by creating strong passwords when registering and then storing them securely in an encrypted store on your computer. Continue Reading »

Greasemonkey is a Firefox extension that basically allows you to write JavaScript scripts that make on-the-fly changes to web pages you visit. As the scripts are persistent, the changes made to the web pages are executed every time the page is opened.

So what do these scripts do? Almost anything. Greasemonkey can be used for adding new functionality to web pages, fixing bugs, retrieving data from other web sites and combining them together and so on. If you’re a big fan of Greasemonkey and a security-conscious Internet user, this hack is just for you. Continue Reading »

If you work on remotely connected machines, most likely you’re going to use SSH to secure your connections. But, what if you just want to work with files on a remote server, but find SSH file transfer tedious in repetition and establishing a VPN tunnel is too complicated?

What you’re looking for is a simple tool for mounting remote file systems easily, transparently and securely as if they were just another part of your local machine. In this hack, we’ll show you how to configure Fuse and SSHFS to access remote file systems securely over SSH. Continue Reading »

If you share a desktop computer, or use your laptop in airports, hotels and other public places, an unauthorized user might try to read valuable data stored on your computer. Also your portable computer can be stolen. These are just two scenarios where malevolent parties can gain access to sensitive information.

One solution to help reduce the risk for stolen data is to use Windows Encrypting File System (EFS). We’ve already covered before how to use EFS to encrypt a file or folder, and in this simple registry hack, we’ll show you how to make it easier for you to encrypt and decrypt files and folders by adding the Encrypt and Decrypt options on the context menus in Windows Explorer. Continue Reading »

Most Windows users work with administrative privileges all the time. Everything they do, from browsing the Internet, and writing documents is performed with full and unnecessary administrative control. From a security perspective, running with administrative privileges is dangerous to your computer and data, but sometimes it’s part of the job.

Web browsing and reading emails are operations that don’t require administrative privileges, and tend to bring malicious code and other nasties back to the user. To be more secure, you should use administrative privileges only for tasks that really require them (e.g. installing updates). Continue Reading »

Clipperz, the recently launched online password manager, can be used to store any kind of sensitive information, such as passwords, confidential notes, credit and debit card details, and so on.

It is free and completely anonymous, and the real cool feature is the direct login: users can save the credentials of their online accounts into Clipperz and create a direct login link for each of them. Then they can access any of them with just one click without typing again any user name and password. Continue Reading »

If you are responsible for the security of your web applications, you know that auditing them for vulnerabilities is a challenging task. You will want to get familiar with the W3AF Web application attack and auditing framework to test your web applications before an attacker with malicious intent does it for you.

W3AF is designed for automated penetration testing of web applications. It comes with built-in utilities that helps you automate the process of vulnerability discovery and exploitation. If you are familiar with Metasploit, the popular penetration testing framework, you should find W3AF easy to use. Continue Reading »

Flash is an interface for rich Internet applications and the core technology behind several popular Web 2.0 web sites. We all have it and we can’t imagine how our Internet experience would be without it. But what about security and privacy?

Adobe allows you to configure Flash security settings via the Settings Manager. In a nutshell, it is a special configuration panel that is displayed only when visiting the Adobe Flash web site. The Settings Manager lets you manage global privacy settings, storage settings and security settings. The information is stored on your local computer. Continue Reading »