Open RAR File

Information, tips and instructions

File Extension RAR Encryption

If you have any sensitive information on your computer it is always worth to think how to protect it. Just think about potential consequences of corporate or personal information getting to the wrong hands when laptop or PC get stolen. Lots of personal computer users even don't think how vulnerable their information when it is stored on hard drive or CD. You can compare information in unencrypted form to a book that anyone can take and read.

You can always object that your computer operating system is password protected. Well if your computer is at home and is not connected to the internet that is good enough. But if you have a laptop and it is stolen it will take someone about 5 minutes to get to your information. All that is needed is just to connect hard drive from your laptop to other computer and grab all your files... Easy, isn't it.

That's why protection of sensitive information should be done in a way that even if it gets in bad hands it cannot be viewed. The simplest way to do it is with encryption. You would think that good encryption is expensive but that's wrong. You can get very cheap and strong encryption using RAR archivers. Current de-facto standard for RAR encryption at this moment is AES (Advanced Encryption Standard). If you want to check how strong AES is just search the internet for "AES" and here is a typical quote you will find:

  • "At the moment, there is no known method to extract the password from the compressed file; so the only available methods are "brute force" and dictionary-based attacks."

So if you pack your information with RAR and put a password on it the only way to decrypt it would be trying to come up with all possible combinations of the password. Such process is called "brute force" and even with current computers on AES encryption will take many, many years.

Note that to make your RAR archive completely secure you should select quite complex passwords (no cell phone numbers, names, addresses, etc.). Brute force decryption applications can use vocabulary of words and may guess common passwords quite fast. Make sure that you have several capital letters, numbers and special symbols. Ideally your password should not be plain english text.

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Extension Details
  Compression file format
MIME Type
  application/x-rar-compressed
  application/octet-stream
Identifying Characters
  Hex: 52 61 72 21
  ASCII: Rar!
Opens with:
  WinRAR
  7-Zip
  IZArc
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