A Brief History of Cybercrime and Cyberwarfare - The Technical and Social History of Software Engineering - page 427

Encryption
Encryption, or concealing plain text by means of symbolic substitutions or trans-
position, is much older than the computer era. An excellent book called The Code
Breakers by David Kahn gives the entire history of codes, codebreaking, cyphers,
and other forms of hiding information. This topic starts with the Sumerians and
continues through the date of publication in 1996.
For some reason, China did not excel in codes and encryption, but India did.
An early sutra on the life of Buddha from perhaps 300 AD mentions that Buddha
as a child amazed one of his childhood teachers by explaining 64 kinds of writing,
including several that appear to be cryptographic.
An even older Hindu Indian document from perhaps 200 BC is the famous
Kama Sutra . One section lists 64 skills that women should learn, and skill number
45 in this list is writing in code.
Encryption with a computer in today's world is not difficult, and many encryp-
tion software applications are available, including some that are free and from
open-source providers. A fairly early form of encryption using software was an
application called Pretty Good Privacy by Phil Zimmerman in 1991.
Encryption should be more widely used and offered as a standard feature. Com-
puter experts can easily include encryption packages in their personal computers,
but novice computer users probably don't even know about encryption packages.
Some of the things that should be kept in encrypted form for safety include:
• Email address books
• Password catalogs, if stored in a computer
• Quicken and financial files
• Credit card information, if stored in a computer
• Text documents with secret or proprietary information
• Spreadsheets with secret or proprietary information
• Database records with secret or proprietary information
In addition, office products such as word processing, spreadsheets, and data-
bases should include an encryption selection when using the “save as” command.
It would not be hard to save an office file as an encrypted document.