South Carolina Governor Mark Sanford wrote what he considered to be private email correspondences to a “dear friend”. Unfortunately, the recipient of his email communications had her email account hacked. This unauthorized access meant that Governor Sanford’s private, intimate email correspondences were media fodder for the national and international press. The breach of email security was one of the reasons that Governor Sanford has much unwanted attention and public embarrassment.

This example may be extreme. However, it illustrated a point. What you do on the computer and on the internet may not be private and secure. What you have on your hard drive, like this year’s tax information, can be accessed by hackers and by malware.

One of the basic ways to protect yourself is to encrypt your computer information.

Encrypt – encrypt – encrypt. Security people have been saying this for years. And we agree. Encryption is an extra layer of protection. Somehow, there is a common belief that encryption is difficult and totally geekish. It’s not that at all. SafeBit Disk Encryption makes it easy:

SafeBit features on-the-fly disk encryption, by creating encrypted virtual disk drives, where you can hide files and folders, keep them encrypted all the time, but still work with these files just like you work with normal files. Disk Encryption is transparent to the user…

This program is efficient – and easy to use. It effectively provides security, and stays out of your way. It really is non-intrusive. And, to encourage you to protect your sensitive data, the SafeBit people are being kind and offering our readers an unbelievable discount of forty per cent (40%) off the normal price:

This is an exclusive, time limited offer that is available to our readers. It expires on July 15, 2009. Safebit supports 32-bit versions of Windows Vista/XP/2000/NT.

There are two more things that needs to be said. The first is that you may have all the security software protection ever recommended on your machine. You may be protecting yourself from malware, spyware, trojans, rootkits and all that other garbage. An infection still can compromise your computer. No security software program dares to offer a hundred per cent protection. What happens if you lose or have your machine stolen? For example, missing/stolen laptops are reported every day. Then, all your confidential information is available to whoever is powering up your machine. And this security breach leads to identity theft. Yes, this type of encryption should be on every government and business laptop. [Give a shout if you want this program in high volume. We will see what we can do for you.]

The other thing is that there is no backdoor. The SafeBit people state this clearly.

The software does NOT include any backdoor. Neither the vendor nor any other entities are able to break the SafeBit Disk encryption.

You must remember your password. There is no two ways about it. The vendor is not going to be able to save you. Again, you must remember the password. The program really is that good. Losing your machine may be costly but losing the confidential personal information on that computer may mean possibly long term anguish. SafeBit is just an efficient, easy way to protect yourself.

The NeoByte people will give you a choice. They are offering our readers a forty per cent (40%) discount on their Invisible Secret product. That product was reviewed previously.

Both these programs will help to keep prying eyes away from your sensitive, confidential files. Protect your privacy.

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Do you want to be a Certified Ethical Hacker?

I know you think you’re a “hacker” because you run scripts that someone else wrote, but… no. It takes a lot more skill than that. It takes education. In some cases, that education may have been attained through experience. Need a jump start?

Izea approached me and asked if I’d be interested in taking an ethical hacking course valued at $2,995. I said: “Sure, let me get my wallet. ARE YOU CRAZY?!” I’m not a security advisor, nor do I want a career in code. That would certainly be a small price to pay for training that could lead to bigger and better contracts if I happened to be in that line of work.

If you’ve ever called yourself a hacker (but weren’t anything more than a glorified script kiddie), here’s your chance to redeem yourself… at least, as far as certification is concerned. I’m not sure you can consider yourself a real hacker until you have the respect of your peers. Still, that shouldn’t keep you from attaining as much knowledge as you possibly can.

Okay, so what if I gave one of YOU access to the full ethical hacking course from EC-Council?

You’d have a chance to learn (or reinforce your understanding of) security fundamentals, penetration testing, computer forensics, disaster recovery, secure programming, and more. All you have to do to qualify for this giveaway is leave a valid comment as to why you’re deserving of it.

Remember that punctuation, usage, grammar, and spelling count – if you’re not willing to throw back a decent paragraph, what makes you think you’d be competent enough to handle such a course? So, give us your story.

Why should you become the next certified ethical hacker? Tell me why! Again, I’d request that you put a little thought into this. If you’re wanting this because of your current or future career, I do believe your reasons should reflect that passion!

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This is Blake P’s submission for the HP Magic Giveaway. Feel free to leave comments for this article as you see fit – your feedback is certainly welcomed! If you’d like to submit your own how-to, what-is, or top-five list, you can send it to me. Views and opinions of this writer are not necessarily my own:

When someone uses the Internet to connect to a computer remotely without the other computer owner’s permission, they have just taken part in a new crime wave. Computers have become the new weapon of choice for those choosing to commit crime today. Computers can be used to open attacks on single computers, or entire networks. To address this crisis, it is necessary to look at the human factors involved. We know that this is a serious issue for businesses around the world and the public alike, but it is almost impossible to state exactly how much computer crime exists.

Some computer crime can remain undiscovered for lengthy periods of time. Many computer crimes may never be reported. If your computer is connected to the Internet, it is a target for criminals wanting to access your personal information and use it for their own purposes. The stealing of private e-mail addresses is another example that can have dangerous repercussions. More and more of our important information is stored, transferred, and processed on computers via the Internet.

The same interconnection between millions of computers that allows you to send e-mail across the world with the press of a button also allows computer criminals to do their dirty work. They wish to gain access to your financial information, and collect email addresses to spam. There are people out there trying every day to get past your security features. The cost of their crimes to businesses is huge. Computer crimes are growing and becoming a serious problem for businesses, the public, and government. Law enforcement agencies rush to keep up with growing computer technology and growing rates of computer-based crime.

As the use of computers has risen over the past twenty years, so has the use of this technology involved in crimes such as fraud, embezzlement, terrorism, theft, larceny, extortion, malicious mischief, espionage and sabotage. Most of the focus in the news today relating to computer crime deals with crimes committed using a computer… and crimes where a computer or a network is the object. The previous type includes crimes such as storing records of fraud, producing false identification. Crimes where computers are the targets can result in damage or change to the computer system.

Many times, officials cannot be sure what information was accessed during the computer attack. These two types of computer crimes are increasingly the computer crime of choice by most computer hackers. When you browse the Internet in the privacy of your own home, that information is not as private as you think because search engines track your every move. Every site that you visit, download, or post messages to is monitored. Privacy is a value, which is most appreciated once it is lost. It is important that we are aware of what is at risk and what our rights are. The Internet is one of the most common tools used to commit computer hacking.

The computer is here to stay. Computers are everywhere. We need not fall victim to computer crime. First, we must acknowledge its existence then do something about the problem. We need to take steps to detect and prevent computer crime.

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http://live.pirillo.com/ – What exactly are hackers? There are a lot of different types of hat: white, gray, and black.

White hates can be considered someone legal: they help find, fix, and generally help make the public more secure than they would otherwise be.

Black hats are people who you would normally consider a hacker: unscrupulous, unethical, and generally the wrong kind of person to piss off. They hack either because they can, for political reasons, or for monetary gain.

Gray hats lay somewhere between white and black: they may not be entirely `without ethics, but they also don't work within the letter of the law.

That's our description, but what's your definition?

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Because I didn’t know how to effectively game the system, our TechMeme hacking efforts at Gnomedex fell on silent algorithms. I wrote about the new “Windows Live Writer” earlier, but I’m not showing up in TechMeme’s current list o’ Live links. Gabe might hate me for 0wning TechMeme in Google (currently #1). I haven’t visited TechMeme much lately, as I already subscribe to Arrington’s and Rubel’s blogs independently.

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