Steganos Security Suite 7 review

Verdict:

Review Date: 17 Dec 2004

Price when reviewed: inc VAT box, £35 inc VAT download

Reviewed By: Simon Edwards

Our Rating 3 stars out of 5

Review
Specs

Steganos Security Suite is an encryption package with privacy features designed to remove evidence of your computing activities.

It can remove, encrypt and hide data, and even set some applications so that they don't leave clues or send log files and other information to companies such as Microsoft.

The software can make deleted files much harder to recover too, which is useful if you're selling your PC and don't want the buyer to read your old emails and banking information.

The encryption utilities are the most useful parts of the package. You can encrypt files to send by email and hide encrypted text in image and sound files. It integrates with Outlook, in a fashion, creating a blank message with the encrypted file as an attachment, but you can't create encrypted messages from within the email package. We had trouble getting it to work with Outlook Express.

You can create up to four virtual hard disks that encrypt any data you copy to them. Each can hold up to 64GB - an improvement on the 32GB drives of the previous version. If you know the password you can mount the drives, which appear as regular Windows disks. When you unmount the drives using the Steganos Safe utility the files are unavailable to anyone without the password. You can't turn off the drive by right-clicking it and using the Unmount option, which is a shame.

Steganos Security Suite is useful for cleaning out programs' logs and encrypting files for your own use, but if you want to send encrypted email messages regular you're far better off using a free package such as GnuPG (www.gnupg.org).

There's little difference between this version and the previous one. This is a decent program, but previous customers needn't bother to upgrade.

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