Privacy and its need

Privacy and its need 

                Privacy is a state where a person is disturbed or not observed by other people. Generally people opt for privacy for storing their important information and sharing those information in a safe way.

Privacy issues

• When it comes to privacy and security there are some real threats. Many of us have lost many of their precious digital information such as passwords, photographs, emails, etc. All these happen because of social engineering.

•  Now what is social engineering? It is process by which the hacker must go through various personal and other information of a particular person to guess his/her passwords for the social media profiles. Once the hacker collects all information about you, he puts that in program that generates hundreds and thousands of possible combination, until they find a correct one.

•  Documents submitted by Washington post indicates that National Security Agency (NSA) collects billions of information of billions of users everyday. NSA compiles all those information in a vast database, they process all those data to find the targeted information.

• Formally speaking, there is no individual person on your phone or personal computer is reading your text messages or monitoring you but all your information are collected.

Famous encryption devices in history

Enigma

• One of the most famous and well known encryption device in history is Enigma. This device was used by Germans to pass messages during Second World War.  The military Enigma has 158,962,555,217,826,360,000 (nearly 159 quintillion) different settings. Famous mathematician Alan Turing worked for 9 months for breaking its settings.
• Americans used an encryption device known as Sigaba to pass the message to during World War. It was considered as the USA’s highest cipher machine during the Second World War. The Sigaba was not deciphered by the enemy nations during war.
•  British’s used an encryption device known as Typex during World War. This device was mainly used by the British armed force. Typex has been attributed as having good security, the historic record on this device is much lesser.

Privacy tools

         

            Everyone in this world are concerned with privacy issues. Let’s see some private search engines and browsers

Private search engine

        

                  Most commonly used search engines by people are Google, Yahoo and Bing. But all these search engines do make a note on our search results. All those curated data are put into a big machine to figure out what are legit and bad. That’s why google provides you best search results. Here are some alternative search engines which has some added features regarding privacy.

·       DuckDuckGo is the most famous private search engine. The searches in the internet would be assumed anonymous. DuckDuckGo indicated that it had significant traffic increase in late 2014, hitting more than 4 million searches per day. link : https://duckduckgo.com/

·       Blekko is another private search engine that has less privacy than DuckDuckGo but it is still an alternative to google and bing. It provides better search results by collecting the search results, but collected search results are deleted within 48 hours.

·       Ixquick is yet another private search engine that is similar to DuckDuckGo as it doesn’t keep any informations, cookies or IP address details. Normally it returns the search results through google and it provides and identical google search.

·       Startpage is similar to DuckDuckGo in privacy settings. The special feature is they have changed the algorithm and search results display.

Private browsers

• The onion router (TOR) is a good private browser. It will create a unique proxy IP address. It encrypts the IP address multiple times and provides reliable features for privacy. When browsing it will be hard to pin point the user’s location and it stores no history. Download link : https://www.torproject.org/download/download
•  Epic browser provides an extreme private browser. It doesn’t keep histories, passwords, DNS prefetching, instance cookies. The browser also has an integrated Ad-Blocker.
• The next private browser is Peer Block. When in connection with the internet there are opportunities to bounce into PC and see what information are stored. It blocks all those sites that might do those activities.
• Mozilla Firefox is browser that provides easy navigation, great performance, advanced security and personalization. Download link : https://www.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/new/

Encryption Software

             When you’re concerned with privacy and security of details present within your PC, here are some software that might help you.

• Vera crypt is free encryption software based on true crypt. It was developed by IDRIX a French IT security firm. When encrypting a partition Vera Crypt uses around 30 times more iteration of encryption algorithm. Entire Hard drive or file containers can be encrypted with Vera Crypt.
•  Disk Cryptor is another free encryption software where you can encrypt an entire hard drive. External devices like pendrive can also be encrypted by using this software. It supports AES, Twofish encryption algorithms.
• AES encrypt is open source file encryption software. Using AES we can encrypt only particular files and not folders or hard drives. It uses powerful 256-bit encryption algorithm. It’s a reliable software.

How to protect passwords

·       The password shouldn’t be simple and more importantly they shouldn’t be socially engineered like nickname, pet name

·       Use alphanumeric case sensitive combinations.

Eg. &win78*lose%

·       Change your password atleast once in 4 months.

·       Never share your passwords with your fellows.