The need of the hour is to become more conscious about the security of sensitive data stored online or offline. Data stored on your computer’s hard drive might get stolen through online means, without the hacker coming in physical contact with your computer. And if somehow, your hard drive gets stolen, then your sensitive data is at no one’s mercy. Having said that, this article, especially emphasizes on how to keep your sensitive hard drive data safe from intruders by using the drive encryption tool: TrueCrypt.

How to Use the Tool?

Whether you are sharing your computer with other users or accessing the Internet very often, your data can get stolen, provided someone is truly intentional to do so. Thus, if you have sensitive data that you want to prevent from getting stolen or accessed, then you need to restrict the intruders from having illegitimate access to your data. That is easy to be done if you get your data encrypted. Serving the same line of purpose, TrueCrypt allows you to encrypt the file or container within a virtual drive. This encrypted container comprising all your sensitive data resides on the password-protected virtual drive that remains invisible to other users.

How to Mount the Encrypted data?

Whenever you need to access the encrypted data on this virtual drive, first you need to make the drive visible. For that simply, launch the TrueCrypt application, select the drive letter for the virtual hard drive and then click on the ‘Mount’ button. Once, you get the virtual drive mounted, it will appear as a normal drive inside the ‘My Computer’ section. Now, you can access the inside files and folders just the way you access the files or folders on other drives. There is no need for typing the password again and again. You have to do it once only while mounting the virtual drive.

How to Dismount the Plain Data?

Once you complete working on these files comprising the sensitive information, you can again dismount the virtual drive and make it invisible. For that simply click on the ‘Dismount’ button in the application. In the dismounted date, all the information inside the virtual drive remains in the encrypted format. This encrypted data exists in an unreadable format. Thus, even if someone gets access or steals the files within this drive, he will not be able to find out the meaning of the information because the information doesn’t exist as plain text. The information exists as a series of random words and alphabets.

Never Share the Password

Encryption security is highly authentic till you don’t share your encryption password with anyone. Thus, it is very imperative that you keep your encryption password to yourself only. Without that password, no one will be able to decrypt the encrypted data.

Other Important Things

It is a cross-platform tool that is compatible with Windows, OS X, and Linux. Millions of computer users prefer using this tool considering its easy user interface, security effectiveness, and cross-platform usability.

Window, OS X, Linux, etc. come with an inbuilt encryption tool. Users prefer using TrueCrypt because it easily overcomes the challenges that otherwise other encryption tools put on the computer and other applications.

Moreover, it’s a completely free tool and above all it is highly preferred for its performance implications. Since, it is a freeware utility and yet so effective, so there is hardly any room for not using the tool.

It uses the AES security algorithm, which is the universal security standard used by government agencies as well. Last year mysteriously, this tool was called off by its creators. Officially, the owners of this application requested their users to avoid using this tool and start using some other encryption app, as the creators are no more managing the security of this tool.

Conclusion

Despite its official call off, people still want the tool back. As a result of that there arises the urgency to conduct an audit of this data encryption tool. It is a too good tool to get discontinued so early. Thus, on public demand, third-party audits are going on to find out whether there is any vulnerability in this tool, or it’s still safe to use.

The first phase of tool reveals that this disk encryption tool doesn’t have as such any severe security flaws. However, more audits are still in the process before confirming anything. Officially, this disk encryption tool is no safer. Thus, it’s better to wait for the results of the final audit and then you can continue using the tool once again.