Steganography: the art of hiding secret information. Once, it was slaves with important tattoos and conveniently fast-growing hair; today, anything from pictures to MP3 files will do. It’s the only chance you’ll ever have to say that Internet porn is vital for keeping your affairs in order, but you don’t risk losing everything if abrilliantday.mp3 accidentally slips into the P2P directory you naturally haven’t got…

The beauty of steganography is that even if somebody has access to your computer, they can’t crack what they don’t know is there. Of course, you probably don’t want to leave the words ‘Steganos Security Suite’ on the ‘Start’ button. However, in practical terms, it’s Steganos’ other features that offer the most potential on a day-by-day basis.

The ‘Safe’ is particularly useful. Password-protected virtual drives can hold up to 256GB-worth of content, accessed via the traditional Windows Explorer interface. Their data can be used by other programs, copied and added to on demand, the drive itself disappearing when you reboot the machine or turn the all-important key.

You also get advice on how secure your passwords are, whether they’re vulnerable to a simple dictionary attack, or achieving a level that even the security services supposedly can’t crack.

These tools go hand in hand with the Steganos Portable Safe – a genuinely useful utility to keep on hand. This creates a temporary hard drive image for you to import all of your documents or applications, then seals and password protects it as an installable file. No software is required on the destination computer, making it ideal for taking files on the road via either memory stick or CD/DVD.

The third component in the suite is simultaneously the most regularly useful and the most noticeably paranoid. Called the ‘Trace Destructor’, it gives Windows a thorough cleaning, burning through almost everything from Internet messaging logs to your history list, switching off Windows XP’s ability to send bug messages back to Microsoft and – inevitably – clearing out cookies. Files not covered by this can be deleted by hand using the final tool on offer: the ‘Steganos Shredder’. Give every file a good once over first, though, because you can’t simply hit the ‘Undo’ button if you shred the wrong document.