Tech and life

Do you save passwords in your browser? Have you stored sensitive information on your PC or Mac? Want to track down what stuff you’ve saved and where? Well I’ve come across a program called Identity Finder which will help to track private information like passwords, and credit card and bank account numbers on your PC or Mac. There’s a free version with more limited capabilities which I’m trying out here. In essence, it will only scan your My Documents folder not the entire hard drive, it won’t look for bank account numbers, and won’t go through emails and attachments; you’ll have to buy a licence for the Home or Premium editions for that. The Free edition searches Firefox and IE for hidden passwords. It will also shred or secure your sensitive data by encryption. Here’s a list of comparisons between the different editions.

So I downloaded and ran the Free edition. The scan took 20 minutes to complete and identified a number of sensitive passwords stored away in some files which I had forgotten about. You can scroll down through the results window and even preview the results for certain file types like pdfs and doc files. Although I don’t use Firefox any more, my hidden passwords there were all visible to Identity Finder so I went into Firefox and removed them. It didn’t report anything for Chrome but I do store those passwords in there so I suspect it isn’t checking Chrome at all.

But it was the passwords stored around the My Documents folder which worried me most. I do use LastPass to store my passwords securely so these back up locations storing passwords on my PC should be dealt with securely just in case anyone accesses it – they’re clearly quite easily found.

Identity Finder allows you to shred the files, or more usefully encrypt them. However I was only interested in the list of sensitive files as I use and like the free Axcrypt for file encryption. I’ll use this to encrypt the sensitive files.

I recommend you give Identity Finder Free a try and see what you find on your PC or Mac. You might be surprised. If you store all your sensitive stuff within My Documents and aren’t interested in emails and bank account numbers, it may be right for you. If not, the paid editions search more deeply and have 1-year to 5 year licences with a 40% discount on the 5-year licence.

I haven’t really blogged about PC security yet because there are so many sites out there doing a great job informing how to keep your machine free from viruses, spyware and bots. I’ll mention one great site later, but first just a brief outline of my favourite antimalware and security applications. Over the years, these programs have been generally highly recommended on forums and blogs and I find them all excellent.

My firewall is ZoneAlarm Free and for anti-virus I use AVG Free. Both these products have served me well for years. For antimalware, I use SUPERAntiSpyware Free edition. This has been recommended for some time by the experts on the Motley Fool forum ‘Help with this Blasted Computer’, a forum I really like and trust for tech help. More recently, the program has also been picked up and recommended on the Podnutz computer repair podcast as the product which identifies and eliminates spyware which many other antispyware programs miss.

I route all my incoming email through Gmail as I find it’s excellent at eliminating the spam emails which my ISP and web host let slip through.

I use a product called RUBotted from TrendMicro to identify behaviour associated with bots.

As a password manager, I’ve just started using LastPass and so far I’ve found it excellent for managing my online passwords. One feature I really like is that you can quickly log into different online accounts at the same site very easily. For example, I have different Delicious accounts for personal and blog bookmarks and I can move between them very easily. I’ll be doing a separate post on LastPass later.

All the programs I’ve mentioned are free and I recommend them all. However, if you want real-time antispyware protection, then check out SUPERAntiSpyware Professional edition.

As has been said many times before, the best form of PC security is the person behind the keyboard. Don’t go to dodgy sites, and don’t click on attachments in email unless you are absolutely sure you trust the sender.

But if you really want the lowdown on PC security, great advice on free apps and how to keep your system out of danger, read and subscribe to Bill Mullins’ Weblog.

I’ve been subscribing to his blog for several months now and Bill’s advice on computer security and products is second to none. Here’s just one post from his archive that will give you an idea what security software you need.

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