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What happens to your computer when you walk away from it? Nosy neighbors coming over to take a peek? Music just keeps playing? Here's a quick and easy way to put an end to all that.

USB PC Lock Pro is a little application that makes your USB drive into a key that locks your PC when you unplug it. Plug it in, and everything runs like usual; unplug it and you effectively lock your computer, including MSN Messenger, stop streaming audio, mute your speakers, and all that. Now you don't have to remember to do all those things individually, or worse yet, just forget them all and hope for the best.

USB PC Lock Pro is a Windows application. And of course, you need a USB drive as well.

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USB drives are pretty cool. You can take all that data and stick it in your pocket and walk away. That's handy if it's your drive and your data. That's not so handy if it's in somebody else's pocket.

Rohos Mini Drive is a tool that creates a hidden, encrypted partition on your thumb drive. The partition is totally hidden until you enter the correct password. You don't need to be an admin for the machine, you just need to know the password to open, read, and write from this hidden volume. As far as Windows is concerned, it's a real drive, but once you log out, it goes away and doesn't give any indication that there's more data on the drive than meets the eye. Now if the unthinkable happens and somebody walks off with your data—or you just drop it, leave it plugged into the machine, or any of a hundred other nasty scenarios—all is not lost, and you don't have to go join the Foreign Legion.

Rohos Mini Drive is a free Windows application. To use it, you'll (obviously) also need a USB drive.

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A simple password is an ineffective password. A single password that you use for multiple purposes is a risky password. By the time you cover all the bases—complex, mixed upper- and lower case, alphanumeric and punctuation marks, no dictionary words—you've got a list of great passwords, but alas now you can't remember any of them. You need a "password locker" tool to keep track of them all. That's fine, as long as you always sit at the same desk with the same machine. What if you're out and about and need one of your passwords? Now you're in trouble. Enter Passpack.

Passpack is an online password manager tool. You can enter up to 100 entries for free, and they don't have to be just passwords. Save emergency info, travel info, confirmation numbers, all that sort of thing. The one thing they do ask is that you not store financial information here. Should everything go south, it's one thing if somebody can log into your blog; it's a totally different matter if they should log into your bank account and clean you out.

For most purposes, Passpack should give you plenty of security for your data. You always connect via secure HTTPS connections, and your data is super-encrypted as it sits on their servers. They've even got "disposable log-ins" for use on public computers. Pretty cool.

Passpack is a free service, and should be compatible with most modern web browsers.

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It's the nightmare scenario: your laptop is missing. Whether you just misplaced it, or somebody decided that they needed it more that you did, your world has just come crashing down around you. If you don't have strong passwords on everything, you may have your data stolen. Even if everything's buttoned-up tight, there still are things on that machine that don't exist on your desktop box. Oh, yeah, there's the whole hundreds or thousands of dollars worth of replacement necessary to get you up and running again.

LocatePC may be able to give you a hand here. A free application, its purpose in life is to let your know where your little darling is. When the "bad guy" fires up your computer, it will send you an email giving you enough information that you just may be able to figure out where your machine is. It will report its current IP address and other information that may allow you or the authorities to contact the ISP who controls that address, and may help you to figure out who has your machine.

The publisher doesn't make any claims or guarantees that you will be able to recover your machine with this information, but it seems like it's a pretty painless way to help make that recovery more likely.

LocatePC is a Windows application. You must be running Windows 98 or later, and of course your must have an email account to receive any notifications that it sends out.

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You know that you erase data from a computer hard drive that the data really doesn't go away, right? Even reformatting your drive can leave enough stuff behind that somebody with the right tools and a fair helping of determination could resurrect your old financial information long after you've forgotten about it. Sure, when you dispose of an old system you can pull the hard drive, open it up, and destroy the disk platters. But suppose you want to donate your old laptop to charity, or give it to the kids, or even just get rid of some really bad poetry you've written? You need a tool that really makes it go away.

Eraser is just such a tool. Rather than just relying on your operating system's deleting files, Eraser goes out and overwrites deleted files in such a way that it becomes extremely difficult to bring them back. If you've written something on a piece of paper with a pencil and then flipped that pencil around used its eraser to get rid of it, you can still see a shadow of what you wrote. With Eraser, not only have you erased those pencil lines, but now you've gone back and scribbled all over where you had written. Curlicues, cross-hatching, "X's" on everything—you get the idea. Much more difficult to get back what was there originally.

Eraser is a Windows tool. It runs on any 32-bit version of Windows from Win95 on up; it is even supposed to run on DOS.

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How many passwords and logins do you have to keep track of? Work, home, banking, various online accounts—it's probably anywhere from several to dozens. If you're using reasonable passwords for these accounts—long, a mix of characters, no dictionary words, and different passwords for each account—then it's going to be just about impossible to remember them all. While a bunch of Post-Its stuck on your monitor may be the standard way to save a list like this, it's not really the preferred way. There's just not much security when your passwords scream "Free! Take one!" to anybody who happens to walk by.

Password Safe is an application that lets you keep track of all those passwords, and keeps everybody else out of them. With Password Safe, all you have to do is remember one password, and now all the rest of them are safely tucked away for you. You can choose to store all your information in one database, or you can use multiple ones—one for work, one for home, one for shopping, etc.

Password Safe is available for Windows, and also in a Java version that will run on Linux and Mac machines as well.

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It's a dangerous place out there. Problems may be right around the corner, whether on the Internet, or even on your corporate network. Spyware, Trojans, backdoors—the list of threats goes on and on. You can install anti-spyware tools, virus checkers, and a host of other tools, but keeping this stuff off your system to start with may be the important first step.

A properly-configured firewall can make all the difference in the security of your system, and even in the systems of those who share a network with you. By monitoring the activity coming in to and leaving your computer, a firewall lets you know what's really going on with your system. Keystroke loggers, for example, can't just "phone home" and give away your passwords and account numbers. When some program you haven't approved tries to access your network, the firewall's going to ask you if that's okay. Sure, you're willing to let Firefox talk to the world, but when you get some unexpected, gnarly-sounding apps trying to talk to the world from your machine, you'll be able to stop them in their tracks. That helps keep your machine safe; in addition, that keeps the nasties from spreading to other hosts on your network.

PC Tools Firewall Plus is easy to set up and customize to your specific needs. You don't need a computer science degree, and you don't need to have an IT guy in the next cube to get it up and running.

PC Tools Firewall Plus is a Windows application. It requires Windows 2000 or later.

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How secure is your data? Whether it's on your hard drive, moving across your network, or even out on the 'Net, there is always a real danger that your important private information may fall into the hands of folks you would rather not have see it. There are plenty of precautions that you can take to secure your data, including firewalls, antivirus tools, secure connections, and more. Here's another arrow to add to your security quiver.

Kruptos 2 is a personal encryption tool that allows you to secure your files with 256-bit encryption. You can change filenames when you encrypt them, so that obvious signs, like files named AllMyPasswordsAreInThisFile.doc don't give away the store. It also has the ability to shred and securely dispose of files you really want to get rid of. In addition, it allows you to create self-decrypting files. This last feature means that you can encrypt a file, email it to somebody else, and then they can decrypt it without having to install this tool, something that generally isn't available with encryption tools.

Kruptos 2 integrates with Windows Explorer, so it's available via a simple right-click of your mouse.

Kruptos 2 is a Windows application. It requires Windows 2000 or later.

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The Attack Tool Kit is a framework for checking your Windows box for system vulnerabilities. By "attacking" your system yourself, you can see what the "bad guys" might see, and take appropriate countermeasures before your machine is hijacked or your data is misappropriated.

All you need to do to run a scan is to specify the host name or IP of the system you want to check, select the specific test or tests you want to run, enter any appropriate options for that test, run the check, and then analyze the results. Individual tests are specified via "plug-ins" that users can select, or even create on their own.

If an ounce of prevention is worth a pound of cure, then Attack Tool Kit may be the heaviest thing you do today.

Attack Tool Kit is licensed under the GPL and is available as a free download for Windows users.

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Modern Windows systems–those that employ an NTFS file system–allow system administrators to exercise a great deal of control over which applications can be executed and which cannot. This ability is an obvious security safeguard, since users won't be able to run programs that aren't known to be safe on the system. Unfortunately, though, there are still devices out there that don't use the NTFS system: floppies, CD-ROM drives, as well as drives that may be available across your network.

Trust-No-Exe is a security tool that allows you to specify which applications are safe to run and which are not. By specifying locations (the Windows directory, Program Files) where applications can be run or even the names of which apps can or cannot be executed, administrators can greatly tighten down the security on the systems for which they bear responsibility. Trust-No-Exe recognizes all types of executable files, not only .exe program files, but even the older .com programs, as well as .dll files, screen savers, and all other type of executables. This means that your network won't become vulnerable to accidental (or intentional) compromises of security just because somebody tried to open that malware-carrying birthday card the received via email, or to losses of productivity because of new games being fun from CD-ROM drives.

Trust-No-Exe is a free Windows app that will run on systems that support the NTFS file system–NT, 2K, XP, etc.

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