Encrypt a File or Folder

The only secure way to hide your files is through encryption. Encryption turns your data into an unintelligible mess unless you have the password. Windows contains a built-in way to encrypt files, and ties the password to your user account—so you can only see the files if you’re logged in as the right user.Difficulty: Easy

Level of Obscurity: Low
Level of Security: Medium

You can see instructions for this in the “Encrypting Files Using the Encrypting File System” section of this guide (you’ll have to scroll down to the last section to see it). All you need to do is right-click on a file or folder, select Properties, go to Advanced, and check the Encrypt Contents to Secure Data checkbox.

The only downside to this method is that it links the encryption to your user account. That means if

10 Bulk Extractor

10 Bulk Extractor

bulk_extractor is a computer forensics tool that scans a disk image, file, or directory of files and extracts
information such as credit card numbers, domains, e-mail addresses, URLs, and ZIP files. The extracted information is output to a series of text files (which can be reviewed manually or analysed using other forensics tools or scripts).
Tip: Within the output text files you will find entries for data that resemble a credit card number, e-mail address, domain name, etc. You will also see a decimal value in the first column of the text file that, when converted to hex, can be used as the pointer on disk where the entry was found (i.e. if you were analysing the disk manually using a hex editor for example, you would jump to this hexadecimal value to view the data).

Bulk_extractor comes as a command-line tool or a GUI tool. In the example above I set the bulk extractor tool to extract information from a forensics image I took earlier and output the results to a folder called “BE_Output”. The results can then be viewed in the Bulk Extractor Viewer and the output text files mentioned above.