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Protection Beyond Antivirus: 4 Easy Ways to Secure Data on Your PC

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  • 6 min read

How secure is your sensitive personal, financial or work-related information on your computer? We all know that antivirus and antimalware software is essential for any Windows device, but is it enough? The simple answer is no. With network intrusion and hacking attacks on the rise, it becomes increasingly important to look for additional ways to protect your data.

According to a Statista report, network intrusion was the most common cybercrime type in the United States in 2022, followed by business email compromise and inadvertent disclosure. Similar trends are true for most countries around the world. In most instances of this type of cybercrime, users end up with their data stolen, their social media or other online accounts hacked, resulting in reputational and financial losses.


How to Protect Data from Theft or Loss?

Having real-time antivirus protection enabled and running regular anti-malware scans are both good and necessary measures that absolutely need to be taken to secure data on your PC. However, we won’t be talking about those here, because antivirus software is already the first thing that comes to anyone’s mind when they think about data protection.

To ensure that you take away some useful advice to boost the security of your data beyond antivirus scans, we will be looking at additional ways to make hackers walk away empty-handed. Let’s go over the often overlooked options you have to secure data.


1. Delete Privacy Traces

Your passwords and online account login information, your bank card numbers, SSN or other personal information that needs to be protected may actually be stored in various locations on your computer and be accessible to skilled hackers. This type of data gets saved in web browsers, in various applications and in some system files. If you care about keeping this information safe, you need to regularly check your computer for it and get all traces of your private data erased. The easiest way to do it is with the help of a tool like the Protect scanner in Auslogics BoostSpeed. The tool automatically identifies privacy traces in the common locations they may be stored in, and cleans them up for you.


2. Shred Sensitive Files

You may not be aware, but there is a digital equivalent of the physical shredder we use in our offices. File shredding software lets you delete confidential documents in a way that will make them unrecoverable, overwriting the files in multiple passes with random data.

To keep your sensitive files protected, you can use the File Shredder tool in BoostSpeed. Click on the “Add” option and choose “Add Files” or “Add Folder” to add the items you want shredded. Keep in mind that this operation is irreversible. Just like with a paper shredder, documents get destroyed permanently.


3. Make Deleted Files Unrecoverable

The files that are deleted on your computer can be restored not only from the Recycle Bin, but even after the Recycle Bin has been emptied. Any deleted data on your PC is recoverable until it gets overwritten with other data. This means that if a hacker gets access to your computer, they will be able to easily search through your deleted files, get them restored and copied for any malicious purpose.

How do you prevent this? The quick way is by “wiping” your drives with a special tool like the Free Space Wiper in BoostSpeed. The app overwrites all previously deleted files on your PC with random data sets to ensure that nothing can be retrieved. All you have to do is choose the drives you want secured and click “Wipe.” Don’t worry about the files and folders you have on your drives – the tool only erases deleted data without doing anything to your current files.


4. Back Up Your Data

One of the common types of malware today is ransomware. In 2022 alone, organizations saw almost 500 million attempted ransomware attacks worldwide. Cybercriminals use this type of malware to lock users’ computers and demand a ransom to be paid. Can you imagine losing access to your PC and not being able to get any of your files? That would be painful! Which is why backing up data on a regular basis is crucial for anyone who panics at the thought of losing access to any of their PC drive contents.

You can back up your data to a USB drive or to the cloud, the latter being recommended for the convenience of access from anywhere. The tools to use for data backup are also plenty. Use the apps provided by some cloud services if you just want to sync a specific folder to the cloud. In this case, you will most likely need to save your important files to this folder to ensure they get backed up.

Another option is to use a program that allows setting up different backup profiles and scheduling them to be completed automatically. The BitReplica app from Auslogics is an advanced backup tool that can be used to secure data and protect it from loss. You can access it from the All Tools tab in BoostSpeed.

Combined with antivirus and antimalware scans, using these four methods will allow you to maximize PC and data protection and avoid the costs and headache of dealing with data theft or loss.


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