Remember your school days when a teacher’s dull mutter only made you sleepier not smarter? But you’re not supposed to sleep during class, so some of us used to pester our classmates or – if you’re sitting in the rear – play Sea Battle (or Battleship, or whatever it is called these days) or passed notes to friends.
If a teacher was more into upholding discipline than dispersing knowledge, then a cipher of sorts was applied as a “security measure” – either it was a slang only understandable to a selected few, or swapping letters numerical positions in the alphabet. A few smarter ones could devise their own kind of ciphers.
This is an old and popular means to protect data from prying eyes, well-rooted in history since ancient times. It is widely known that Caesar used a substitution cipher for his private correspondence; Leonardo Da Vinci wrote most of his personal notes in mirror, only using standard writing if he intended his texts to be read by others.
Much of today’s data, unlike classmates’ notes, is worth a lot. And if we are to protect it, we can use an old and proven method, as adjusted for Moore’s law: at least some of the encrypting algorithms considered to be among the strongest 10 years ago, can be cracked today in a matter of ten minutes.
Today, we can cipher not just one document, but entire archives and data storage media, both stationary and removable. And we don’t need to build Enigma for it: Kaspersky Endpoint Security 10 has done it for you already.
The first steps are:
- Download Data Encryption module [available only in Advanced и Total editions]
- Install it
- Set up encryption policy
- Allow access for the selected users.
File Encryption would require authorization only when accessing the file. If disks or removable drives are being encrypted, no file would be accessible without entering a login ID and password. So, if the PC or flash drive are lost or stolen, no one will be able to copy or read the encrypted data they contain.
More data about setting up Data Encryption and other capabilities of our products are available in the Kaspersky Lab’s Knowledge Base.