I’m sure you’ve heard or read many stories before about laptops getting stolen containing thousands/hundreds of thousands of records on patients/customers/etc. Those records usually include very sensitive information such as a person’s Social Security Number. And a lot of times the data on those stolen laptops were not encrypted!!! Now those people are at high risk of identity theft. This wouldn’t have been such a big deal if they took an extra step of saving the data in an encrypted volume using a strong encryption algorithm. This is very easy and simple to do, too, and there are many encryption software out there.

The one I would recommend is this free open-source disk encryption software called TrueCrypt. I’ve been using this software for about a year and a half now and never had a problem with it. It’s very easy and simple to use and supports different encryption algorithms, including AES-256 (Advanced Encryption Standard, 256-bit key) which is the encryption standard adopted by the U.S. government.

My new laptop actually came with its own encryption software but I still prefer TrueCrypt better because of its simplicity. What you basically do is you create a volume using the software by specifying how much disk space you want to allocate for it, the type of encryption to use, and the volume password (make sure you choose a strong password!!!). Then this encrypted volume would look just like a regular file on your hard drive. You then use TrueCrypt to mount that volume to your OS (it will prompt you for the volume password that you created earlier). The mounted volume would look just like a regular hard disk drive and you use it just like a regular hard disk drive as well. The encryption is done on-the-fly. You can also set TrueCrypt to automatically mount the volumes on startup. TrueCrypt is available for Windows Vista (32-bit and 64-bit)/XP/20003/2000 and Linux.

You can download TrueCrypt from here for free.

Cost of TrueCrypt? $0. Cost of your stolen data falling into the wrong hands? Well, that depends, but it could be HUGE!!!