It is not a secret to all of us that hackers are everywhere. They have the skills and devices to hack into your system for their personal gain. They could acquire anything and everything once they got in, they could steal your pictures, videos, emails and most importantly, information about you. If these hackers has acquired info about you, your family and your bank accounts then they can use is against you. Hackers could either steal money from your bank account or black mail you to extort something.

If your computer contains sensitive information that you want to protect, I would recommend using a good encryption program. This way, hackers could not easily steal any info about you. For those who are not familiar with an encryption program, I will explain it here on how it works.

First of all, encryption is a next level of protection that scrambles the contents which could not be accessed by someone without its secret key or password. Encrypting a data could be compared to a zip file with a password wherein you need to input a password first before you could get the files inside. To cite an example, encryption can also be seen on... websites that use credit card for transactions. Those sites normally use the SSL (Secure Socket Layer) as encryption to encrypt the details of your card that you've used online.

For Windows 7 users both ultimate and enterprise editions, they do have a built it drive encryption program called BitLocker. BitLocker is available for Pro and enterprise editions of Windows 8 and 8.1. In turning on this feature, Windows will ask you to set a password and I would recommend putting one so that it would not be that easy for others to turn your BitLocker off.

For those users who are not using versions of Windows that has a BitLocker installed and wants to better secure their hard drives, external hard drives or even flash disks, there would be several free programs available for download that you could use but before you download any programs on the internet, it would be best to search it first for any feedbacks. This way, it would be easier for you to know if the program that you want to use is good or not.

Lastly, besides encryption, you must also make sure that the antivirus and windows update of your computers is always up to date to receive security patches being distributed every now and then.