Why are Secure Zones important?

Secure Zones are locations on your drive that are monitored by ArchiCrypt Shredder. If you delete files in a Secure Zone, ArchiCrypt Shredder automatically manages the deletion and guarantees that the files are securely deleted.

The importance of Secure Zones stems from the way many applications operate, of which most users are not aware.

Almost every program creates so called temporary files with information, which the application needs to work properly. Many application programs create back up copies of the working file. They then work with the copy in order to reduce loss in case of program failure. When the application is ended, the copy is deleted using the operating system (unsecure). It almost goes without saying that the original content of the files that have been deleted with the operating system are easily restored. Almost every user has already noticed Microsoft Word’s well-known ~$*.doc and mso*.* files.

Browsers also manage their so-called cache (temporary memory in which content from the Internet is placed. If a website is called up again, the content is loaded from the cache and not from the Internet. Access to the content and loading the pages is therefore much quicker). If the data in the cache is no longer up to date or the cache limit has been reached, the browser deletes the old data via the operating system. Of course, you are not able to influence these deletions that are simply done using the limited means of the operating system and are therefore very unreliable.

The list of programs that work similarly can be extended almost endlessly. This reality appears most often in office applications, multimedia, picture viewing and processing programs, email clients, exchange groups, chat programs and pack programs. You can also not influence the deletion process here.

Traditional deletion programs or trace eliminators also do not help here because those tools cannot intercept any insecure deletions.

These data leaks are especially problematic in terms of encrypted data. Such data leaks can be devastating, and all the more so when you want or need to conceal sensitive data from unauthorized viewing. Without having any knowledge of your password(s), an attacker can simply read the data that has been left behind by the application you were using to work with or view files. A simple freeware program for restoring deleted data suffices.

ArchiCrypt Shredder 3 is the only program in the world that can intercept these unsecure deletions in Secure Zones and replace the action with secure methods.

Note:

Of course, you can get rid of these data fragments if you securely overwrite the unused space every time after using specific data. However, the time needed to carry out these measures can be gigantic, depending on the size of the media!