encryption

Google announced today that it will encrypt by default Web searches and results for users who are signed in.

People who don't have a Google account or are signed out can go directly to https://www.google.com, the company said in a blog post.

Encrypting the communications between an end user and the Google search engine servers will protect against snooping by anyone who might be sniffing on an unsecured Wi-Fi network, for instance. Secure Sockets Layer (SSL) is available now for Web search, image search and all the search modes except for Maps, Google said in this … Read more

Part of virtual memory on a computer is where the contents of RAM are written to the hard drive (as a special file called a "swapfile") to free it up for other uses. As you use your computer, the system will load programs and data into RAM, which is like having your work on the top surface of a desk. As you place more items on the top of your desk (RAM) it may get cluttered, so to keep your work flow efficient you might free some space by putting a few items into the desk's drawers (… Read more

Expensive high-tech digital radios used by the FBI, Secret Service, and Homeland Security are designed so poorly that they can be jammed by a $30 children's toy, CNET has learned.

A GirlTech IMME, Mattel's pink instant-messaging device with a miniature keyboard that's marketed to pre-teen girls, can be used to disrupt sensitive radio communications used by every major federal law enforcement agency, a team of security researchers from the University of Pennsylvania is planning to announce tomorrow.

Converting the GirlTech gadget into a jammer may be beyond the ability of a street criminal for now, but that … Read more

Mobile apps are still not secure when it comes to storing certain personal information, according to a new study from security firm ViaForensics.

Dissecting a variety of apps for Apple's iOS and Google's Android, ViaForensics found that 76 percent of them store user names in cleartext without encryption, while 10 percent store passwords in the same way, making such data more vulnerable. Running a series of tests from November 2010 through June 2011, the security firm checked out apps from several categories, including financial, social networking, productivity, and retail.

Each individual app received a pass, fail, or warn … Read more

LAS VEGAS--If your Windows laptop is stolen, be warned: new research shows how a thief can gain access to the passwords used by your Amazon.com, Google, Yahoo, Facebook, and other Web accounts.

The passwords for accounts in the cloud are supposed to be protected by Windows' built-in encryption. But a team of security researchers demonstrated at the Black Hat security conference here how last week to bypass the operating system's security.

A thief--or someone unconcerned with the finer points of federal hacking laws--can take advantage of the vulnerability to discover the passwords stored by Web browsers and other … Read more

A strong password is one of the best defenses against a security breach, but managing all the different passwords on all of your documents can be a real pain. That's where Password Encryption Analyzer Free comes into play. The program offers a way to scan all of your documents to check for and recover passwords, but it came up short when we put it to the test.

The program's user interface is as basic as it gets. On the left side, you can select the locations for the program to scan: Computer, Documents, Local Drives. From there, radio … Read more

The security add-on for Firefox called HTTPS Everywhere (download) that forces HTTPS encryption on numerous popular Web sites has graduated to its first stable release, about a year after it was released into public beta.

The tool does not let you force HTTPS (Hypertext Transfer Protocol Secure) willy-nilly on Web sites. Instead, it includes a series of rules that supports sites that allow HTTPS encryption. The Electronic Frontier Foundation said in the blog post announcing the release that it encompasses more than 1,000 popular sites, including Google Search, Wikipedia, Twitter, Facebook, bit.ly, GMX, Wordpress.com blogs, The New … Read more

Ever since its introduction in OS X 10.3, Apple has maintained its FileVault encryption technology for securing home folders in an encrypted disk image that mounts when users log into their systems. Apple's only major changes to this technology were in Leopard with the implementation of Time Machine, where sparsebundle disk images were used to facilitate incremental backups. In OS X 10.7 Apple has introduced a full revision of FileVault, that approaches file encryption from a completely different standpoint.

With FileVault 2, Apple has done away with the standalone encrypted disk images in OS X, and replaced … Read more

USB flash drives are easy to lose if you don't keep track of them. In part three of our "What to do with your USB flash drive" series, we'll show you how to encrypt your USB flash drive so that if it gets lost or stolen, its contents will be safe and sound:

Encrypt it Step 1: Download and install TrueCrypt.

Step 2: After you've inserted an empty USB flash drive into your computer, launch TrueCrypt and click on the Create Volume button.

Step 3: At the TrueCrypt Volume Creation Wizard screen, select Encrypt a … Read more