HOIC (AKA: H.O.I.C., short for High Orbit Ion Cannon) is a free and open-source network stress testing and DoS/DDoS attacking application for Windows, Mac and Linux. It was written in Visual Basic and C#, developed by Anonymous (a hacktivist collective) during the Operation Payback after federal agents shut down Megaupload, and released as LOIC's predecessor.

To protect the security of files/data, I have always found it preferable to hide and/or set an access password for a partition rather than to encrypt the partition or an entire hard disk. The reasons are: 1) The performance and efficiency of reading/writing encrypted files are extremely low; 2) As far as I know, although an encrypted file is hard to crack, it is the most likely to happen and the most deadly for users to forget their encryption key - there is no solution at all; 3) In fact, even if you just hide one partition without password protection, few people would expect you to protect your private data in this way.

Take-Away USB Flashdisk Encryption (TAEncryption, USB Flashdisk Encryption for short) is a USB file encryption program developed by Michael Stutz from Norway. It supports self-contained file encryption for USB flashdisks or other removable media device, thus making your files there more secure.

PGP (Pretty Good Privacy) is currently the best and most popular data (including texts, e-mails, files, directories, partitions, and whole disk) signing, encrypting, and decrypting program, developed by Phil Zimmermann in 1991. Its source code is open, and it has withstood the challenges from thousands of top hackers around the world. It turns out that PGP is still the most secure encryption software in the world for now (until the popularity of quantum computers, I think). Without a password, no one can decrypt the data encrypted with it!

We set the computer an access password to prevent unauthorized use of our PC. But sometimes we may forget or misremember the password and can not enter the system, thus shut ourselves out. In this case, reinstalling the entire operating system is obviously an inadvisable option. Instead, you can use NTPWEdit this tiny app to modify or remove any existing password of local system accounts easily.