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Security Guru Endorses Bitlocker Encryption

June 17, 2015

Encryption used to be hard. Today, it’s pretty easy and not expensive. A lot of products actually include encryption capability for no additional charge. As an example, put a password on a Word, PDF or WinZip file and it encrypts the contents. You can also encrypt the contents of a hard disk with some versions of the operating system.

The latest concern is whether there are any backdoors built into the encryption product that provides folks like the NSA unencrypted access to the data. In a sudden move, TrueCrypt was modified and announced to be insecure. PGP (Pretty Good Privacy) is considered to be strong encryption, even after being acquired by Symantec. In other words, are commercial vendors being pressured to build a method to allow government’s access to your private data? Noted security guru, Bruce Schneier, used to be a big PGP fan. He has since jumped ship and moved over to using Microsoft’s Bitlocker encryption. I don’t think you can get a much better endorsement than that. Bitlocker is included with Windows 8.1, but is not enabled by default. Make sure you turn on Bitlocker and don’t forget to backup the encryption key!

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