Security
- PC Protection
- Breach detection tools
- Password managers
- File cleaning
- File recovery
- Files and disks encryption
- Email encryption Favorite proprietary, open source and freeware tools
PC Protection
Antivirus, anti-malware
Microsoft Security Essentials (MSE) is an antivirus software product that provides real-time protection against different types of malicious software such as viruses, spyware, rootkits and Trojan horses.
Microsoft Security Essentials is a free download from Microsoft (Space demand: only 17.63 MB.) that is simple to install, easy to use, and always kept up to date so you can be assured your PC is protected by the latest technology.
It’s easy to tell if your PC is secure — when you’re green, you’re good. It’s that simple. Microsoft Security Essentials runs quietly and efficiently in the background so that you are free to use your Windows-based PC the way you want—without interruptions or long computer wait times.
Windows Security (known as Windows Defender Antivirus before Windows 10 May 2020 Update, Windows Defender before Windows 10 Creators Update, or Microsoft Defender Antivirus before Windows 11) is an anti-malware component of Microsoft Windows. It was first released as a downloadable free anti-spyware program for Windows XP, and was later shipped with Windows Vista and Windows 7. It has evolved into a full antivirus program, replacing Microsoft Security Essentials, as part of Windows 8 and later versions.
Secures your PC, files, and privacy 24/7 Real-Time Protection uses artificial intelligence and machine learning to keep you safe from online threats, even emerging threats that no one has ever seen before.
Protects against online scammers Web Protection blocks online scams, infected sites, and malicious links. It also blocks phishing scams, which use fake sites to trick you into revealing private info like your bank details.
Security Advisor all-in-one dashboard Security doesn't have to be complex; our all-in-one cyberprotection dashboard highlights your security status in real time- so you're better informed and empowered to act.
Keep hackers out of your network With more people working from home, Remote Desktop Protocol (RDP) attacks are on the rise. Brute Force Protection stops hackers from guessing your username and password, getting remote access to your computer, and infecting it with ransomware or other malware.
Stops ransomware Ransomware Protection uses proprietary tech to create a powerful defense against malware that locks down your PC and takes your files and photos hostage. Respects your space Scans now use 50 percent less CPU resources than before, and with Play Mode, you can even turn off notifications and updates while you game or watch movies. Makes your security simple Our all-new user interface makes it easier than ever to customize your protection. Schedule scans, adjust protection layers, and choose from three scan modes.
Malwarebytes Katana Engine Our all-new detection engine finds more threats, in less time, with less performance impact than ever before. It also tells you more about threats it finds, like their type and behavior, so you can make smarter security decisions. For example, instead of seeing a generic threat name like “Malware123,” you'll see a name like “Spyware.PasswordStealer,” along with a link to information about that specific threat.
Breach detection tools
Has your password been leaked ?
What is the site all about?
This site came about after what was, at the time, the largest ever single breach of customer accounts — Adobe. I often did post-breach analysis of user credentials and kept finding the same accounts exposed over and over again, often with the same passwords which then put the victims at further risk of their other accounts being compromised.
The FAQs page goes into a lot more detail, but all the data on this site comes from "breaches" where data is exposed to persons that should not have been able to view it.
Why build the site?
This site serves two primary purposes for me: firstly, it obviously provides a service to the public. Data breaches are rampant and many people don't appreciate the scale or frequency with which they occur. By aggregating the data here I hope that it not only helps victims learn of compromises of their accounts, but also highlights the severity of the risks of online attacks on today's internet.
Secondly, the site provided me with an excellent use case for putting a number of technologies through their paces and keeping my hands-on skills somewhat current. Projects like this are an excellent way of staying relevant as my day job increasingly focuses more on software management and less on actually building things (which I happen to love doing!) It's been an enormously fulfilling journey that I've invited others to join me on by way of often blogging in depth about the process, something I intend to keep up as the site inevitably evolves over time.
Password Managers
Bitwarden is the easiest and safest way to store all of your logins and passwords while conveniently keeping them synced between all of your devices.
Password theft is a serious problem. The websites and apps that you use are under attack every day. Security breaches occur and your passwords are stolen. When you reuse the same passwords across apps and websites hackers can easily access your email, bank, and other important accounts.
Security experts recommend that you use a different, randomly generated password for every account that you create. But how do you manage all those passwords? Bitwarden makes it easy for you to create, store, and access your passwords.
Bitwarden stores all of your logins in an encrypted vault that syncs across all of your devices. Since it's fully encrypted before it ever leaves your device, only you have access to your data. Not even the team at Bitwarden can read your data, even if we wanted to. Your data is sealed with AES-256 bit encryption, salted hashing, and PBKDF2 SHA-256.
Bitwarden is 100% open source software. The source code for Bitwarden is hosted on GitHub and everyone is free to review, audit, and contribute to the Bitwarden codebase.
LastPass is a secure, browser-based password manager that supports Firefox, Internet Explorer, Chrome, and Safari.
Sync your passwords between multiple browsers and computers.
With LastPass you can:
- Create strong passwords, knowing you only have to remember one.
- Log into your favorite sites with a single click.
- Fill forms in a second.
- Securely share logins and notes with friends and let others share with you.
All data is encrypted before it is stored on the server. The pro version of Lastpass offers access to Lastpass mobile apps.
A stand-alone version, called LastPass Pocket, is available for Windows, Mac OS X and Linux.
It can be installed on a USB memory device, allowing you to carry your LastPass data around with you. Pocket essentially provides backup capability and offline access for your Vault, although we recommend LastPass Portable over Pocket. It can be downloaded at https://helpdesk.lastpass.com/lastpass-on-the-go-2/lastpass-pocket/
The maximum monthly (non-promotional) price is for a Business plan ($6) with SSO and MFA addons ($5 total).
KeePass is a free open source password manager, which helps you to manage your passwords in a secure way. You can put all your passwords in one database, which is locked with one master key or a key file. So you only have to remember one single master password or select the key file to unlock the whole database. The databases are encrypted using the best and most secure encryption algorithms currently known (AES and Twofish).
KeePassX is an application for people with extremly high demands on secure personal data management. It has a light interface, is cross platform and published under the terms of the GNU General Public License.
File cleaning
CCleaner is a system optimization/cleaning tool. It removes unused files from your system, allowing Windows to run faster and freeing up valuable hard disk space. It can also clear your internet history and act as a fully featured registry cleaner. CCleaner is fast (normally taking less than a second to run) and contains NO spyware or adware!
FileCleaner Pro is an advanced Windows cleaner and file shredder that will keep your PC fast and secure. With its help you will be able to repair Windows errors, speed up computer performance, and protect your privacy in just a couple of clicks.
Speed Up Computer Performance Every time you go online and browse the Web, your browser keeps track of every website you visit. Web history, cookies and temporary Internet files are kept to speed up your browsing and make the websites you've already visited load faster. However, having all these files stored on your computer is a privacy risk. And keeping temporary Internet files without performing disk cleanup will slow down your computer.
BleachBit deletes unnecessary files to free valuable disk space, maintain privacy, and remove junk.
Rid your system of old clutter including cache, cookies, Internet history, localizations, logs, temporary files, and broken shortcuts.
Designed for Linux and Windows systems, it wipes clean Adobe Acrobat Reader, APT, Bash, Beagle, Chromium, Epiphany, Mozilla Firefox, Flash, GIMP, Google Chrome, Google Earth, Internet Explorer, Java, KDE, OpenOffice.org, Opera, RealPlayer, Safari, Second Life viewer, Skype, VIM, XChat, Yum, and more.
BleachBit has never bundled any junk like browser toolbars.
Eraser is an advanced security tool (for Windows), which allows you to completely remove sensitive data from your hard drive by overwriting it several times with carefully selected patterns.
File recovery
Recuva (pronounced "recover") is a freeware Windows utility to restore files that have been accidentally deleted from your computer. This includes files emptied from the Recycle bin as well as images and other files that have been deleted by user error from digital camera memory cards or MP3 players. It will even bring back files that have been deleted from your iPod, or by bugs, crashes and viruses!
Files and disks encryption
Cryptomator provides transparent, client-side encryption for your cloud. Protect your documents from unauthorized access. Cryptomator is free and open source software, so you can rest assured there are no backdoors.
Easy and Reliable
We understand simplicity as a key aspect of security. With Cryptomator you don't have to deal with accounts, key management, cloud access grants or cipher configurations. Just choose a password and you're ready to go.
You don't even need to specify what cloud you use. Cryptomator encrypts files and doesn't care where you store them. This makes it a lightweight application, which we believe is a huge benefit for reliability. Complexity would kill security.
Cryptomator is a so-called transparent encryption utility. This means that you don't have to learn new workflows. Just work with your files as you're used to.
Secure and Trustworthy
Cryptomator encrypts file contents and names using AES. Your passphrase is protected against bruteforcing attempts using scrypt. Directory structures and file sizes get obfuscated. The only thing which cannot be encrypted without breaking your cloud synchronization is the modification date of your files.
Cryptomator's desktop app is a free and open source software licensed under the MIT / X Consortium License. This allows anyone to check our code. It is impossible to introduce backdoors for third parties. Also we cannot hide vulnerabilities. And the best thing is: There is no need to trust us, as you can control us!
Vendor lock-ins are impossible. Even if we decided to stop development: The desktop source code is already cloned by hundreds of other developers. As you don't need an account, you will never stand in front of locked doors.
VeraCrypt is a free and libre source (open source) disk encryption software brought to you by https://www.idrix.fr
Features:
• Creates a virtual encrypted disk within a file and mounts it as a real disk. • Encrypts an entire partition or storage device such as USB flash drive or hard drive. • Encrypts a partition or drive where Windows is installed (pre-boot authentication). • Encryption is automatic, real-time (on-the-fly) and transparent. • Parallelization and pipelining allow data to be read and written as fast as if the drive was not encrypted. • Encryption can be hardware-accelerated on modern processors. • Provides plausible deniability, in case an adversary forces you to reveal the password: Hidden volume (steganography) and hidden operating system. • Multilingual. More than 35 languages. List at https://sourceforge.net/p/veracrypt/code/ci/master/tree/Translations • More information about the features of VeraCrypt may be found in this documentation at https://veracrypt.fr/en/Documentation.html
VeraCrypt is based on TrueCrypt 7.1a at TrueCrypt . In comparison to TrueCrypt, VeraCrypt adds enhanced security to the algorithms used for system and partitions encryption, making it immune to new developments in brute-force attacks.
For example, when the system partition is encrypted, TrueCrypt uses PBKDF2-RIPEMD160 with 1000 iterations whereas in VeraCrypt we use 327670. And for standard containers and other partitions, TrueCrypt uses at most 2000 iterations but VeraCrypt uses 655340 for RIPEMD160 and 500000 iterations for SHA-2 and Whirlpool.
VeraCrypt is licensed with both Apache 2.0 and TrueCrypt 3.0 licenses. Per https://sourceforge.net/p/veracrypt/code/ci/master/tree/License.txt#l24
BitLocker drive encryption provides offline data and operating system protection by ensuring that the drive is not tampered with the operating system is offline. BitLocker drive encryption uses a TPM, either discrete or firmware, that supports the Static Root of Trust Measurement as defined by the Trusted Computing Group.
BitLocker is capable of encrypting entire hard drives, including both system and data drives. BitLocker pre-provisioning can drastically reduce the time required to provision new PCs with BitLocker enabled. With Windows 10, administrators can turn on BitLocker and the TPM from within the Windows Preinstallation Environment before they install Windows or as part of an automated deployment task sequence without any user interaction. Combined with Used Disk Space Only encryption and a mostly empty drive (because Windows is not yet installed), it takes only a few seconds to enable BitLocker. With earlier versions of Windows, administrators had to enable BitLocker after Windows had been installed. Although this process could be automated, BitLocker would need to encrypt the entire drive, a process that could take anywhere from several hours to more than a day depending on drive size and performance, which significantly delayed deployment.
Beginning in Windows 8.1, Windows automatically enables BitLocker Device Encryption on devices that support Modern Standby. With Windows 10, Microsoft offers BitLocker Device Encryption support on a much broader range of devices, including those that are Modern Standby. Microsoft expects that most devices in the future will pass the testing requirements, which makes BitLocker Device Encryption pervasive across modern Windows devices. BitLocker Device Encryption further protects the system by transparently implementing device-wide data encryption.
Email Encryption
GnuPG allows to encrypt and sign your data and communication, features a versatile key management system as well as access modules for all kinds of public key directories. GnuPG, also known as GPG, is a command line tool with features for easy integration with other applications. A wealth of frontend applications and libraries are available. Version 2 of GnuPG also provides support for S/MIME.
GPG4Win provides a Windows version of GnuPG.
GPGTools provides a Mac OS X version of GnuPG.
Gpg4win enables users to securely transport emails and files with the help of encryption and digital signatures. Encryption protects the contents against an unwanted party reading it. Digital signatures make sure that it was not modified and comes from a specific sender.
Gpg4win supports both relevant cryptography standards, OpenPGP and S/MIME (X.509), and is the official GnuPG distribution for Windows. It is maintained by the developers of GnuPG. Gpg4win and the software included with Gpg4win are Free Software (Open Source; among other things free of charge for all commercial and non-commercial purposes).
Creation of Gpg4win was supported by the German Federal Office for Information Security (BSI).
Gpg4win Components Gpg4win is an installer for Windows and contains several Free Software components:
GnuPG The backend; this is the actual encryption tool.
Kleopatra A certificate manager for OpenPGP and X.509 (S/MIME) and common crypto dialogs.
GpgOL A plugin for Microsoft Outlook 2010/2013/2016/2019 (email encryption). With Outlook 2010 and higher GpgpOL supports MS Exchange Server.
GpgEX A plugin for Microsoft Explorer (file encryption).
GPA An alternative certificate manager for OpenPGP and X.509 (S/MIME).
Tutanota is the world's most secure email service, easy to use and private by design. You get fully encrypted calendars and contacts with all our personal and business email accounts. It has open source iOS and an Android apps. The Android app is published on F-Droid (which means the app does not use Google's push notification system) making it a great option if you want to de-Google your life. All data is stored encrypted and can not be searched, i.e. for commercial use. It offers dead easy end-to-end encryption.
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Encrypted Calendar Organization is key: Regain control over your busy life with Tutanota's encrypted calendar. The calendar is integrated seamlessly into the secure email client and can be easily accessed on any device. Event notifications are sent end-to-end encrypted to fully protect your privacy.
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Contacts: Tutanota allows you to add and manage encrypted contacts, always at hand.
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Search: Fast search of encrypted data guarantees privacy.
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Mail Storage 1 GB of storage is free for everyone.
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Easy - one password for everything Tutanota wants to provide the easiest-to-use and most secure email client. You do not have to fiddle with multiple passwords for signing in and for encryption/decryption. The state-of-the-art encryption technology handles all the encryption and decryption complexities. Still: Your password only belongs to you. It is being hashed and salted locally before being transmitted to the servers.
Only you with your password have access to your encrypted data, profiling is impossible. Tutanota combines security with ease-of-use so that everybody can use end-to-end encryption. Now you can take back your privacy easily!
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Secure email with absolutely no compromises, brought to you by MIT and CERN scientists.
Swiss Based ProtonMail is incorporated in Switzerland and our servers are located in Switzerland. We are outside of US and EU jurisdiction and all user data is protected by strict Swiss privacy laws.
Zero Access Because of our end-to-end encryption, your data is already encrypted by the time it reaches our servers. We have no access to your messages, and since we cannot decrypt them, we cannot share them with third parties.
Backwards Compatible ProtonMail works out of any modern web browser, there is nothing to install. We are also backwards compatible with other email providers so you can continue sending and receiving emails from friends who are not using ProtonMail.
Forever Free We believe privacy is a fundamental human right and should be available for everyone. That's why we offer multi-tiered pricing including a free version that anyone can use. Let's bring privacy back to the people!
Fully Anonymous We do not log IP addresses or require any personal information to sign up. We accept bitcoin and cash payments for paid accounts to ensure even paid account users have complete privacy.
Cross Platform ProtonMail works on all devices, including desktops, laptops, tablets, and smartphones. It's as simple as visiting our site and logging in. There are no plugins or apps to install - simply use your favorite web browser.
