When software isn’t enough, take your PC security to the next level…
One of the very first things any user should do when they turn on a new computer for the first time is check for security software. Before going online, it’s best to have a firewall, antivirus and anti-spyware application in place. Of course, that’s not always possible, because you probably have to go online to download these things, but the point remains the same: get your security software in place as soon as possible.
However, as important as software is for keeping your computer and your files safe, you can lock things down even more by using physical measures too. Security hardware might not make as many headlines as software solutions, but if you’re serious about keeping your computer and data away from unwelcome parties, it’s a route you should seriously consider.
Of course, unlike software, there are no free lunches here. If you want to use hardware to secure your PC, then you’ll need to put your hand in your pocket and pay for it. Prices for such products differ massively depending on what they offer and where you get them from, but some security hardware is very expensive. The good news, though, is that a lot of the more pricey stuff is designed for professional use, so you probably won’t need to spend that much. And as we’ll see shortly, there are ways to use hardware that you might already own, so although they’re not necessarily free, at least you’ve already paid for them.
PC Theft Prevention
Before we look at hardware methods to secure your files, let’s begin by considering ways to prevent your actual computer from being stolen. For obvious reasons, this is more of a problem with laptops, but if you’re in the habit of taking your desktop PC to LAN parties or if you run a business where your computers are in reach of the public, then it’s also applicable to you.
Probably the most popular anti-theft system for computers is the Kensington Security Slot. Created by the Kryptonite Corporation in 1999, this security anchoring system has since become property of the Kensington Computer Products Group. It’s found on all almost all laptops, as well as many desktop PC cases, monitors, projectors and even games consoles. As you probably know, it consists of a small hole, reinforced with metal. To this you attach a special lock, which has a metal cable with a loop that you wrap around something heavier or difficult to move, such as a table leg.
Kensington itself sells locks, including a combination lock from Amazon, for around £20: (goo.gl/MxjJr7). This might seem expensive for a cable, but this is a high-quality product, which offers around 10,000 possible combinations, and its solid construction means it won’t just break if a thief tries to make off with your PC. You can see the rest of the Kensington range of locks at www.kensington.com, which includes locks that use keys rather than combinations.
Also on Amazon (and elsewhere on the web), you’ll find locks that cost as little £2, made by third parties. These might seem like a good idea, because they’re just metal cables with locks at the end, but they’re not worth it. The metal cable might be strong enough, but the questionable quality of the locks themselves mean you might end up with the cable stuck on your computer permanently.
However, you don’t necessarily need to spend 20 quid to get a decent Kensington-compatible lock. Right now, for example, Lambdatek has a Dell lock on sale for £7.44 (goo.gl/CTqnk9). There are many more such locks, with similar prices, but whatever you choose, it makes sense to go for one from a brand you can trust or from a retailer with a good refund policy.
What if your computer doesn’t have a Kensington slot? For example, certain MacBooks don’t have one, because they’re so thin, so there’s no room for the lock to turn inside the shell of the laptop. The solution in this instance is a special case that the MacBook sits in and which you attach the bundled lock to. You can get this direct from Maclocks (goo.gl/EVR0M0). At £50, though, it’s not cheap, and it’s not much good if you don’t own an expensive Apple machine.
One possible solution is a Kensington laptop locking station. Designed for laptops between 13.3” and 17” in size, it’s made with a steel interior, and it attaches to the frame of your laptop, secured by a lock and key. Because it doesn’t rely on a potentially vulnerable Kensington slot or a cable, it’s possibly more secure, but it’s not the most convenient or versatile solution: you’ll need to screw the base to your desk before you can use it. Also, it costs about £40 (Amazon – goo.gl/gFKN6K), although you might consider that a worthy investment if your laptop is valuable to you.
Desktop users might be interested in something like the Tryten Universal Computer Lock Kit Standard (T3) (£16 – goo.gl/EjqfrK). This comes with a number of accessories and attachments so you can secure your PC, monitor and peripherals. One problem we have we with it is that some of the attachments are affixed using superglue, but it isn’t a huge drawback.
Encrypted Storage
Even with the best planning and security measures in the world, it’s almost impossible to prevent other people getting access to your computer. But that doesn’t mean they should be able to access your files. You can, of course, use encryption software to protect your data, but you can also take things further by keeping your most important files on a separate hard drive or flash disk, complete with its own encryption and maybe even a physical number pad.
iStorage (www.istorage-uk.com) is an expert in this field, with its range of PIN-protected drives. Starting from £29.99, for example, you can get a Datashur Personal USB 2.0 flash drive with 8GB of storage (16GB and 32GB models are also available), which comes with its own keypad, providing AES 256-bit hardware encryption, negating the need for software.
If your needs are more advanced, then iStorage also has the Datashur and Datashur Pro ranges, which include extra features, like water and dust resistance, greater capacities and more.
The maximum-sized drive you’ll get with these, though, is the 64GB USB 3.0 Datashur Pro (£129 – goo.gl/TKT2Ng). If you need more than that, then you’ll need to look at the company’s other products, which use either hard drives or SSDs for storage. There are quite a few different models available, including a USB 3.0 desktop hard drive version that can have as much as 8TB of space and costs up to £479. There’s no doubt these drives can get pretty expensive, especially with the higher-capacity SSD versions, but you’re paying for the military grade encryption and customer support as much as anything. Anyway, if you’re looking to spend this much on a secure drive, you’re probably guarding something of great value, and you’re probably doing it for a business, so such expense is less of an issue. Home users will most likely be looking to buy from iStorage’s ‘Personal’ range, but it’s worth checking out the company’s website to see what best fits your needs and budget.
If you don’t need this level of protection or capacity, then you can also pick up encrypted flash drives that don’t a keypad. They’re still hardware encrypted, though, so the unlock key is built right into the drives themselves. Your options here are numerous, and all the major names offer something that can fulfil this role. The 4GB Integral Courier Advanced Encryption Standard flash drive, for example, can be yours from Ebuyer for just £9.36 (goo.gl/rUs3H5). The Integral 32GB Secure Key, meanwhile, is currently on sale at MyMemory for just £12.95 (goo.gl/AoYa09). There are loads more too, and they all offer a reasonable solution for anyone needing affordable hardware encryption for their files.
Fingerprint Scanners
Both Samsung and Apple have included fingerprint readers in their newer smartphones, so it’s safe to say this technology is ready for the mainstream. Indeed, a fair few laptops also include this feature, but if you want to add it to a system that doesn’t already have it, then you need to buy a new peripheral.
The most obvious thing would be a dedicated fingerprint scanner, but despite (or perhaps because of) this technology’s prevalence in other devices, there isn’t that much choice when it comes to external fingerprint readers. A quick search for ‘fingerprint scanner’ in eBay, Amazon and Google Shopping, for example, will return results for products made by companies such as Eikon, SecuGen, APC and Digital Persona, which are either too small or too specialist for us to have heard of them before. That’s not to say their fingerprint scanners are no good, but it’s odd that the only scanner we found from a mainstream technology firm was a Microsoft model that is discontinued and only works with Windows XP or Vista.
Prices of fingerprint readers vary massively too, from as little as a tenner (goo.gl/m8wzOe) to over £100 (goo.gl/FQPXL6). The cheaper ones tend to use a swipe-style reader, while more expensive readers allow you to press your finger or thumb down on a sensor for it to be read. How well they work is hard to say, because we haven’t had a chance to test them, and user reviews are fairly thin on the ground. For that reason, we’d suggest trying one out before you buy. If that’s not possible, then buy it online, so you’re protected by the usual 14-day cooling-off period, which will give you enough time to see if your chosen scanner works with your PC.
Another option would be to buy a keyboard or even a mouse with a built-in fingerprint reader. We’ll start with the mice first. Again, Microsoft did produce a mouse with a fingerprint scanner built in, but the Microsoft Wireless IntelliMouse Explorer with Fingerprint Reader now seems to have been discontinued.
What is available to buy, though, is the Cherry M-4230 USB Mouse with Integrated TCS2 Biometric Sensor. Good luck finding it in stock in a UK store, though. If you order, it’ll most likely be coming from America, which will mean a fairly long wait for delivery. If that doesn’t bother you, then one place you can get it is B & H Photo for $139.95 (goo.gl/X5tRMl), but that’s before any customs charges you might have to pay.
It’s probably safe to say that the fingerprint-reading mouse hasn’t exactly taken off. Keyboards with the same technology, however, are a little easier to come by. That might not be much use if you’re a laptop user, but provided you can actually accommodate a new keyboard, something like the Lenovo Preferred Pro USB Fingerprint Keyboard might appeal to you. Currently available from Kikatek for £44 (goo.gl/z0TRJ4), it’s a full QWERTY keyboard with a full-size numpad. And, of course, it has an integrated fingerprint scanner, which you can use with the appropriate software to replace Windows passwords, BIOS passwords and more.
If you’ve got more money than sense, then you be tempted by the Cherry G83-14550 from Lambdatek (goo.gl/06Z8HV), currently on sale for a whopping £170.40. Other than the price, all you need to know about this keyboard is that it has a fingerprint scanner, but it doesn’t have mechanical keys or anything else to justify its high price. One to avoid.
Beyond these two, there’s not much else around. Microsoft did release a keyboard with a fingerprint scanner, but like its other biometric products, this doesn’t appear to be available any longer.
Eye Scanners
If you think it’s hard to get a fingerprint scanner, it’s nothing compared to the current market for consumer-level eye scanners. These are also much more expensive. Currently, the only freely available eye scanner in the UK is the Eye-Lock Myris, which is a hockey-puck-shaped device that scans the user’s iris. That information is then used instead of character-based passwords. There are couple of problems with this. One: it costs about £280 (Amazon – goo.gl/iG7ITj). And two: it doesn’t really work very well (according the tech blog Mashable – goo.gl/uxkF29).
Similar to the Myris is the Iritech IriShield. Currently available for $190 from Fulcrum Biometrics (goo.gl/RazkFE), it also reads the user’s iris. It doesn’t, however, appear to be aimed at the consumer market at all, so you won’t find it on any mainstream retail sites.
Clearly, the demand for biometric security isn’t that great among regular users. Microsoft seems to have dabbled in it briefly, before giving up, and only smaller, more specialist companies still seem to be selling such products in the UK. This seems strange, considering how useful fingerprint scanners in particular can be for logging into home computers and websites. For the majority of us, though, a decent password manager will probably be all we need anyway.
The best hardware for securing files, though, would appear to be encrypted storage, whether you opt for a simple flash drive with a hardware encryption key or something more sophisticated like the Datashur range.
Such measures could prove invaluable too, if your PC is stolen. A Kensington lock might slow down a thief or prevent a quick snatch and grab, but a determined criminal can fairly easily break this slot or cut through the lock’s cable, given enough time. If that happens, you’ll be grateful if all your important files are inaccessible to the thief.
Ideally, though, a combination of all these measures can be used, along with decent software, to limit, if not eliminate, the anguish of your computer’s security being compromised.
Create A Hardware Key For Your PC
If you want to, you can use certain programs to turn a regular USB flash drive into a security key for your PC. Without this drive plugged into your computer, others will not be able to access the system. And if you lose the key, then it’s not the end of the world, since most of these programs also allow you to unlock your computer with a password too. The USB key, however, provides a quick and easy way to unlock your PC, so you can set a particularly long, complex backup password to increase security.
As for the actual software, you have a few choices. One popular option is Predator. This Windows-only program comes with a ten-day trial, after which you have to purchase either the Home Edition (US$10) or the Professional Edition ($15). There’s also a Professional Edition with one year of support for $30. Find out more at goo.gl/Gg9Ecc.
Also worth checking out is Rohos Logon Key (goo.gl/Nl7Re), which has the added benefit of being available for both Windows and Mac OS X. This offers a two-factor authentication option, so when you insert the flash drive, you have to enter a PIN code too. Also, it promises to work even when Windows is launched in Safe Mode. It comes with a 15-day trial, after which it will set you back £21.84.
Those who would prefer to pay nothing at all, however, might like to try the open-source USB Raptor (goo.gl/yZZBgB). This program checks for the presence of a particular encrypted file, which is stored on the flash drive of your choice. If it can’t find this file, the PC locks the user out. Plug in the drive and you’re granted access. You can also set backup passwords, and there’s an option for a network override too. Check the Sourceforge wiki for more details on how to set it up.
Put Your Best Face Forwards
Although video calling hasn’t taken off quite as well as many of us expected it would (particularly filmmakers), the vast majority of laptops now come with webcams built into them. And if you’re a desktop user, there’s a good chance you own a webcam too, whether you actually use it or just keep it in a drawer – having bought it when videocalling was in vogue.
Assuming you do have a webcam, then you already own a piece of hardware that can be used to lock your PC. Yes, with this simple bit of kit and the right software, you can use facial recognition to keep others out of your computer and data. And the best thing is it doesn’t have to cost you anything.
Windows and Mac users can use KeyLemon (www.keylemon.com/app) to unlock their computer using facial recognition for free. There are also Bronze and Gold editions too, which offer far more functionality. They cost $19.95 and $39.95 respectively.
Similarly, Rohos Face Logon has a free edition and a Standard version for $24. Again, though, the basic feature of unlocking your computer with facial recognition is included in the free version.
Fans of completely free software can try BananaScreen (bananascreen.en.softonic.com), a Windows-only application, which also unlocks your computer only when the camera can see your face.
Of course, with these and any other facial-recognition programs, there’s always a chance that someone could just use a photo of your face to unlock your PC. But if you’re only worried about strangers getting access to your files, then it’s quite probable they won’t know what you look like anyway. It might not be the most secure method of locking down your computer, but it’ll do a reasonable job in everyday situations.