Category Archives: Encryption

Encryption, Privacy, Security, Shortcut keys, Strong Passwords, Windows

Encrypting Your Stuff – Create Very Strong Passwords

July 16, 2013 Computers Made Simple Leave a comment

There’s no sense in encrypting your personal files and folders if you don’t secure them with a strong password. Today, we’re going to show you how to do just that. You’ll create an easy to remember password that will lock your material tighter than Fort Knox.

1. There are some prerequisites to this course. In order to create this special password, you have to use a number pad, either the one on the right side of your full-size keyboard or the numbers you can access using the FN key on a laptop, for instance. Yes, there are numbers across the top of every keyboard but those are not the ones we want to use here. If you always use a full-size keyboard, make sure the NumLock key is pressed down. If not, figure out how to use the ‘other’ numbers, usually on the top of certain keys, like this:

Photo of Character Map Passwords 1 — **See the small numbers on top of some keys, even on top of number keys?**

On this keyboard, you would press the FN key and the J or K or L key, etc. The normal number keys on the top row are not what you would use, except for 7, 8 and 9 with the FN key.

2. Ok, once you’re clear on that, let’s bring out the Character Map. Click on start, down on the bottom left of your taskbar, then type ‘charmap’ into the slot. Charmap.exe should show up but, if it doesn’t, type charmap.exe and press enter.

Photo of Character Map Passwords 2 — **It’s up at the top there, but you may have to type the full charmap.exe.**

3. Welcome to Character Map! Here’s what you should see when you hit Enter:

Photo of Character Map Passwords 3 — **This is known as Character Map.**

With this handy part of Windows, you can pretty much type any letter in just about any language. Symbols, archaic letters, they’re all here.

4. The default typeface for us is Arial. Your default typeface may be different. Here are some of our choices:

Whichever one you choose to create your password, make sure you remember it. Each selection here has a completely different set of characters. You can make a password out of any of them but you must remember which typeface you chose.

5. Once you make a selection, click on one of the letters/symbols. This is an example:

Photo of Character Map Passwords 5 — **This is an O, sort of, with two dots on top. See the keystroke on the bottom right?**

This letter, according to Character Map is ‘U+OOD6: Latin Capital Letter O with Diaeresis’. Phew! Forget that, it’s not important. What is important are the words on the bottom right corner: Keystroke: Alt+0214.

6. Open Notepad. Use Notepad not Word or Wordpad. Notepad doesn’t mess with letters, it just shows what you type, nothing else. Once Notepad is open, Press the Alt key down and keep it down. On your number pad, type 0124 then let up on the Alt key. Like magic, this Ö appears. Practice in Notepad until you get it right.

Note: Not every letter or symbol has an ‘alt+number’ shortcut. Obviously you would choose ones with a shortcut, otherwise you have to copy and paste the symbol which wouldn’t be as easy. What we want here is to be able to type the symbol/letter without opening Character Map, right?

7. Now it’s time to play a little memory game. You can do this a few ways but here’s a suggestion. Look for a symbol that has a familiar number shortcut. In our example above, the shortcut is Alt+0214. Maybe 0214 are the last four digits of your phone number. Get it? Look for a combination that rings a bell and is something you can never forget; your age, your address, your shoe size, whatever. Once you have that symbol, you’re on your way to a very secure password.

8. The hard part is done. You have a symbol that pretty much locks up your password from anyone who doesn’t know your secret. You could still use something simple for the rest of the password but once you insert that symbol, it is very, very secure.

9. Here’s an example of an unbreakable password: !pass0214ÖBod

For fun, we’ve put both the typeface we used, Bodoni, and the number you have to use with the Alt key to create the special character, Ö.

These are the basics and we’re sure you can create very strong passwords using this technique. Have fun with this and make sure you comment if you have questions about this.

TIP: Character Map is for reference only. You only need it to find the character you want to use and the numbers that create it with the Alt key. Character Map does not have to be open when you are typing the character.

Thanks for reading!

7-Zip, Encryption, Free Software, Security

Encrypting Your Stuff – Part 1

July 15, 2013 Computers Made Simple Leave a comment

This week, it’s all about encryption. First, let’s encrypt a zip file. If you are putting things like financial information, passwords, or personal data up to the Cloud, it should be encrypted. This post will be a tutorial for doing just that.

1. Download and install 7-Zip. Here’s the link: http://www.7-zip.org/download.html

The program is free, don’t worry about it. It’s also trustworthy and does not add toolbars or additional software.

2. Create a folder that contains the various files that you want to zip and encrypt. You can encrypt one file, or a whole folder. We feel that a folder is best for uploading to the Cloud but you can just as easily do this to one file. Zipping, if you didn’t know, takes a folder and all of the files in it, makes them smaller by taking out the empty space within the file, then creates a new ‘zipped’ file. Windows itself can do this but it won’t encrypt that file. Encryption here means ‘lock it up with a password’. Once you get the folder set up, move it to somewhere that’s easy to find. We put ours inside of our Dropbox folder.

3. Open 7-Zip then navigate to the folder you just created. That’s easier said than done but, if you put the folder in your Dropbox folder, it will be very easy to find.

Photo of 7Zip 1 — **This is probably what you’ll see when 7Zip starts up**.

4. See the green + sign up on the top left? Just under that is an icon of a file folder with a green arrow pointing up. Keep pressing that icon until you get to the root directory of your computer, most likely that will be C:. When you get there, double click on the C: You’ll see something like this:

Photo of 7Zip 2 — **This is something like what you’ll see next. Look for the Dropbox folder.**

5. When you see the folder you want to zip and lock with a password, highlight it (click on it once), then go up to the top and click on File. This is what you will see:

Photo of 7Zip 3 — **7-Zip then Add to Archive.**

6. Now 7-Zip knows that you want to create an archive. The menu that pops up gives you several options to choose before 7-Zip creates that archive. Here’s the menu:

Photo of 7Zip 5 — **Don’t get nervous, we’ll walk you through this.**

7. For now, there are two sections of this menu for you to fill out. The first is the Archive Format. The choices there are shown in this menu:

Photo of 7Zip 6 — **It’s probably best to choose ‘zip’ here.**

There are several different kinds of ‘zip’ files (zip is the generic term just as kleenex is generic for tissue). 7-Zip has its own kind and there are ‘tar’ files, etc. If you are always going to be accessing the file from the same computer, choosing 7z is fine. You must use 7-Zip to open 7z files, right? That’s why ‘zip’ might be better. With that archive format, you can use just about any zip program to unlock it, including Windows.

8. Next we have to choose a password. That’s easy but, and this is vitally important, make sure you remember the password. If you lock a file or folder with this system and forget the password, there is no way you can unlock it easily. Whatever is in that file is lost, for all intents and purposes. Read that again, we’ll wait.

9. Once you choose OK, 7-Zip works its magic and the file or folder is zipped up tight. We chose the 7z format and this is what we see when we look in the file’s original location:

Photo of 7Zip 7 — **There it is. You can double click on it now.**

10. Double click on the zip file and this is what you’ll see:

Photo of 7Zip 8 — **Enter the password. That sucker is locked up for good!**

11. Enter the password and the file opens. Enter the wrong password and it won’t. It’s locked up tight.

That’s the basics of locking up a file or folder. You can secure a single file or a whole folder with this. The larger the file or folder, the longer it takes but 7-Zip is fast, don’t worry. Now you can take that archive and email it, put it on a flash drive, send it up to your Dropbox, whatever. It’s quite secure.

TIP: You might be asking yourself, how secure is this system? As you know, governments have all the toys to open this kind of file. They have computers and programs specifically set up for this. They can open it. Can your tech friend Raoul open it? Probably not. It would take him years to find the right combination of letters, symbols and numbers…your password, in other words. That’s why you have to make a good one!

Thanks for reading!

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Email, Encryption, Privacy, Security

Encrypt Your Emails – Part Two

June 12, 2013 Computers Made Simple Leave a comment

In our last post, we described how to encrypt an email using JavaScrypt, a simple but effective way to hide your personal information from prying eyes. That post is here: Encrypt Your Emails For Free. Today’s post assumes that you’ve read the linked one so, if you haven’t read it yet, head over and check it out. We’ll wait…

Back? OK, here we go. The message that we used yesterday was very simple but the encoded message was obviously encrypted. What if we still wanted to encrypt a message but didn’t want it to look as if it was in code? It’s pretty clear that an encrypted message would raise suspicions about its content, even if that content was completely innocent. Here’s how to solve that problem.

Steganography is the term for this process, hiding something in plain sight. There are several ways to do it but, for now, let’s stick with what we learned yesterday. To accomplish this task, you must have two browser windows open. First, open up the link from yesterday’s post. Here it is: JavaScrypt Encryption.

When the page opens, run through the same process as we described previously, generate a code, write a simple message and then encrypt it. You’ll end up with something that looks like this:

Photo of Steganography 1 — **Gobbledy guck, mishmash, pure Blarney, right?**

It’s painfully obvious that this is an encrypted message. Let’s make it look like bad poetry. Open this page: Stego! Text Steganography. Both pages are by the same person, more on him later, so they look very similar. What we’re going to do here is simply copying and pasting from one browser window to the other. Our aim is to hide the encrypted message in text that looks vaguely normal, in other words ‘words’. Let’s get going:

1. We will use the encrypted message in the photo above. Highlight it then right click and choose Copy. Go to the Stego page (link just above this), click in the pink box, right click and choose Paste. Under the pink box is the word Hide. Click it.

Photo of Steganography 2 — **Click the Hide button.**

2. Once you click the Hide button, a new message appears in the orange box at the bottom.

Photo of Steganography 3 — **What’s this? Some gibberish?**

3. What we have now is an encrypted message that has been transformed into something that looks a bit less intimidating and a whole lot less suspicious. What do we do now? We can’t decrypt this gibberish, not directly anyway. We have to ‘unhide’ it. Normally you would have to copy the words from an email then paste them into the orange box. For now, just erase the encrypted message in the pink window and leave the words in the bottom window. Like this:

Photo of Steganography 4 — **Empty the top box and click the word Seek.**

4. Click Seek and the original encrypted message will appear in the top box again.

Photo of Steganography 5 — **Voilà! It’s back again.**

This two page, multi-step process takes an email, or any text document for that matter, encrypts it, then changes the encrypted message into something that resembles normal English. If this text happened to be buried in a much longer document, there’s a good chance that it wouldn’t be noticed. While this whole thing takes a bit of extra time, we think you’re more likely to slip beneath the radar, if you know what we mean.

TIP: In order to use this system, all of the settings have to be the same for the encryption and the decryption as well as for the ‘hiding’ and ‘seeking’. Each page of the site gives you ample information to change the settings to your own specifications but be sure to make a record of those settings if you want to have a problem-free experience.

The site that we’ve linked to here belong to John Walker, co-creator of the Autodesk company and its software (AutoCad). Both pages that we’ve mentioned can be downloaded and run on your computer, no Internet connection is necessary. In other words, you could perform all of your encryption/decryption tasks ‘offline’.

Should you encrypt your emails? That’s up to you. We don’t but we sleep a bit better knowing that, if the need arises, we could. If you think the process described here is new, it’s not. The two pages we’ve mentioned were created in 2005. We are not naive enough to think that this simple encryption process is invincible to decryption by a third party and neither should you. What we have described here will keep your private information out of the hands of people who shouldn’t be snooping in your stuff anyway. Besides, it’s fun to experiment with this and it makes very interesting chatter at the dinner table, right?

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Email, Encryption

Encrypt Your Emails for Free

June 11, 2013 Computers Made Simple Leave a comment

As of today, June 11, 2013, it’s been revealed the the U.S. government has been snooping in every email, every text message, every online chat and probably every other form of communication for quite a while. Your privacy is gone, you probably know that already, and we think it’s going to be a long time before you get that privacy back. We think that it’s not only the U.S. that is doing this. We’re in Canada and we’re quite sure it’s happening here, too.

How does all of this affect you? You’re probably saying, “I’m not doing anything illegal. I’ve got nothing to worry about”. That may well be true but this spying could affect your life in many different ways. Do you bank online? Do you do your taxes online? As you know, your tax information is supposedly between you and your tax department. It doesn’t matter if you are a hitman for the mob, as long as you declare your income, you are safe from prosecution by the tax department. That’s all changed, hasn’t it? Now the government knows you’re a hitman, they know how much you make and they know, likely, who pays you. Anything that you report to the IRS, for example, is wide open to every other government agency. This has been happening since 2007, by the way. Maybe it’s time to rethink how you do things on the Internet.

Today’s post deals with email encryption. We’ve been searching for an easy and free way to re-secure privacy when sending and receiving emails. We’re going to do at least two posts on this, so let’s get started.

1. Head over to this site:

JavaScrypt Encryption and Decryption

2. The page itself is self-explanatory but we’re going to run through the steps to use it, just in case you get lost. There are three parts to any encryption process. First you need to know how to decrypt what you encrypt. If you think of encryption as the secret code writing that you may have enjoyed as a child, you know that in a simple transposition code, the person who gets your message must know how to rearrange the letters to read it. With the type of encryption we’re discussing here, you need a key to both encrypt and decrypt any message you send. The key takes the place of the encoding rules that you used as a kid.

As you can see on the JavaScrypt site, the key is the first part of the process. You can use your own or have one generated for you. The generated key is quite long and complicated but, obviously, very secure. In your case, you could use a simpler key that could be made up of a series of numbers and letters, something that is relatively easy to remember. Think of parts of your first address, your old cell number, your mother’s maiden name, things like that. If the pieces of the key are easy to remember, then you don’t have to write it down. In that case, although the key may not be as secure as the generated one, it is a bit more secure because it’s not written down anywhere, right?

3. Once you have the key, you need the message to encrypt. You may not have a need to send an encrypted email to a friend or relative but maybe you want to send personal information to yourself. Let’s say you want to save a copy of your password list. Encrypt it and send it to yourself in an email. As long as you remember the key, your information is safe and you can retrieve it.

Let’s generate a key on the site:

Photo of Email Encryption 1 — **A text key is shown.**

4. The site describes the difference between a Text key and a Hexadecimal key. We’ve used a Text key but read the description and make your own decision. Next comes the message:

Photo of Email Encryption 2 — **Something simple for our example.**

Enter the text in the green box. Don’t worry about length at this point. You can always send long messages in multiple emails.

5. Once the text has been entered and you have chosen a key, kit the Encrypt button:

Photo of Email Encryption 3 — **Message above, encrypted message below. Jason Bourne would be proud of you!**

6. So far we have two of the three parts we need. Let’s see how we get the third part. The encrypted message is in the pink zone. Let’s delete the original message from the green zone:

Photo of Email Encryption 4 — **The original is now history but the encrypted message still remains.**

7. Move down to the pink area and set your cursor up in the top left corner and hit the Enter key to move everything down one line. That will leave an empty line at the top, right?

Photo of Email Encryption 5 — **An empty line is needed to copy and paste the key into the encrypted message.**

8. Go up to the key line, highlight it and click the right mouse button then choose Copy. Go back to the pink area and click in the empty line, right click and choose Paste:

Photo of Email Encryption 6 — **The key is in place now so press the Decrypt button.**

9. As long as the green box is empty, the message will reappear there as soon as you press the Decrypt button.

Photo of Email Encryption 7 — **There it is! As if by magic, the message appears again.**

That’s it! You’ve just encrypted then decrypted a message than would be very hard to decrypt unless someone knew the key. How secure is this system? Secure enough that it would take a fairly long time for anyone to decrypt it, if indeed they could. The better the key, the more secure the message.

TIP: Keys are not a one-time, throwaway item. You could use a different key for each message but you could also use the same key for each friend. As long as someone has the key you used for encryption, they can decrypt your message.

If the key is easy for you and your friend/relative to remember, there is no need to write it down. Even so, you don’t want to send the key in an email, right? There are many ways to get the key to the person without using electronic means. Be creative!

This has been a long post but it’s an important topic, isn’t it? Let us know what you think about this or any other topic that’s important to you.

Thanks for reading!

Cloud Privacy, Cloud Storage, Encrypt Dropbox Folder, Encryption, Security, TrueCrypt

Protect Your Privacy with TrueCrypt – Part 2

October 3, 2012 Computers Made Simple Leave a comment

In this post, we’ll describe how to encrypt a small folder using TrueCrypt, a free and very powerful encryption tool. You can put anything you want in this folder, of course, but the point of this exercise is to have something that is extremely safe from prying eyes that will allow you to keep your passwords or online account numbers private. Once you create this folder, you can put text files, documents…basically whatever you want to, as long as the total size is not larger than the folder you create. We’ll explain that later.

1. Download and install Truecrypt. You can install Truecrypt or run it from a folder. You could even keep the Truecrypt folder inside your Dropbox folder in order to make it available on every computer that you access Dropbox with.

2. Run Truecrypt. Here is the window that comes up at the start:

Photo of TrueCrypt menu — **Click on the Create Volume button or click on Volumes then Create New Volume.**

A volume is something that only Truecrypt can open. As you will notice later on, there is no three letter file designation to the folder/file/volume that you create. No other program will recognize it, not Windows, not Notepad, only Truecrypt.

Menu for TrueCrypt — **For the next few screens, you’ll just accept the default settings. Here, choose ‘Create an encrypted file container’ then click Next.**

Menu for TrueCrypt 3 — **Click Next to start creating a Standard TrueCrypt volume.**

Don’t get confused here. You’re not choosing a file or folder, you are really creating a volume somewhere you are on your computer. We chose our Desktop but you’re on your own here. All you do in this menu is simply type in a name, make up anything you want. You can even use a three letter file name to make this Truecrypt volume look like another kind of file. The default program for that type of file, .avi or .mp3 for instance, will NOT be able to open it, remember? Only Truecrypt can open this file.

Photo of TrueCrypt — **You’re on your own here but we chose a 1 MB file, lots of room for our password text file.**

10.

11.

12.

Move your mouse all over this menu for a minute or two then click Format. Truecrypt will then format the volume that you just made, creating, more or less, a separate drive on your computer. That drive is controlled by Truecrypt, nothing else. Windows doesn’t know anything about it, other than it takes up space. It cannot open the volume and will not even suggest a program that might open it.

13.

14.

That’s it for now. This post is long enough but we’ve accomplished a lot. You now know how to create a locked volume that can be opened only by you. Even if someone gets access to your computer or your cloud folder, they will not be able to see what is inside this folder. Cool huh?

Next time, we’ll show you how to use this volume. Basically, you just mount it using your password, open it then drop files into it and then dismount it. Once you dismount it, it is locked again.

Thanks for reading!

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