Everyone has some secret documents. Some have secret emails or pictures, while others keep some passwords stored in files on their hard disk. But this poses another risk – what if a hacker breaks into your computer and steals your secret documents? One possible solution to the problem is to encrypt all your secret documents, so even if someone lays his hands on them, he cannot gain any information from them. You can use freeware Sophos Free Encryption Tool for easily encrypting your documents.
Sophos Free Encryption Tool is a freeware program. It is provided free of cost by the makers of the popular Sophos Anti-virus software – a UK based company. It can encrypt files using the AES 256-bit cipher. AES is a well respected cipher algorithm in the encryption industry today.
You can download the Sophos Free Encryption Tool from http://www.sophos.com/products/free-tools/sophos-free-encryption.html. The download is available in form of an installation program. The file name is in the form sfe_2401_sfx.exe.
After you have installed Sophos Free Encryption Tool, you can encrypt any file you want, just by right clicking on the file and selecting Sophos Free Encryption → Encrypt as shown.
You will be asked the password for encrypting the selected file. Provide a password and Sophos Free Encryption tool will also tell if the password is poor, average or excellent.
You can click on the Options button to choose more options like create the encrypted file into a self-extracting executable, compress the data when encrypting, securely delete the source file after creating the encrypted file etc.
Click OK after providing the password and selecting the desired options. You will see a file with extension changed to .UTI in the same folder as the source file (file selected for encryption). This new file is the encrypted file.
If you want to decrypt this file, then just right-click on it and select Sophos Free Encryption → Decrypt as shown.
You will be prompted to enter a password. Enter the same password which you used to encrypt the original source file. Then click OK button to decrypt the file.
The decrypted file with the original extension will be extracted in the same folder as the encrypted file.
You can not only encrypt a single file but you can also select a group of files or a folder to encrypt. Sophos Free Encryption Tool is excellent tool for encypting your personal secret documents. It uses a strong AES encryption and therefore is very reliable. You can not only encrypt a single file but you can also select a group of files or a folder to encrypt. The encryption and decryption are both very easily done. This is an indispensable tool that everyone should have on their computer.