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Gems and Additions from Datamation's Security Software Roundup

Datamation has a good piece out titled 50 Must-Have Open Source Tools for Security. The applications are organized into categories such as encryption, anti-virus and forensics. When it comes to security software, both the open source arena and the freeware arena offer very solid applications. Here are a few open source security apps that I agree with Datamation on, and some top-notch freeware choices to boot.

Datamation has TrueCrypt atop its list of encryption tools. As we covered here, TrueCrypt is a solid tool for on-the-fly encryption, available for Windows, the Mac and Linux. The latest version ensures that someone who examines your hard drive, even someone who demands and gets your password, shouldn't be able to find all of the encrypted data. It relies on a number of proven encryption algorithms.

ClamAV gets a nod from Datamation in the anti-virus category for UNIX and Linux users. For Windows users ClamWin is also a very popular, solid choice. In this category, I would also recommend, for Windows users, a title from the freeware world: AVG Anti-Virus. I've used it extensively, and it's very good at protecting against malware, allowing you to set scheduled malware scans for any time of day.

In Datamation's Spam category, SpamAssassin is called out. This application uses a number of algorithms to protect against spam and is operating system independent. It's released under the Apache license, and has won awards from both Datamation and InfoWorld.

Do you need to clean up a Windows system? From the world of freeware, there is a true gem of an application in this category, which I wrote about here. Malwarebytes' Anti-Malware does a remarkable job of finding suspect files on systems that other security software titles won't find. Check the reader comments here for how others have found this to be true. I use this to keep numerous Windows systems free of creeping crud.

Datamation's list includes lots of other good open source security applications. Check it out.

• spamassassin
• ClamAV
• TrueCrypt
• ClamWin

by Tessie on Oct. 30, 2008

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