X

PGP announces complete hard drive encryption

Declan McCullagh Former Senior Writer
Declan McCullagh is the chief political correspondent for CNET. You can e-mail him or follow him on Twitter as declanm. Declan previously was a reporter for Time and the Washington bureau chief for Wired and wrote the Taking Liberties section and Other People's Money column for CBS News' Web site.
See full bio
Declan McCullagh

PGP Corporation on Monday announced a new way for Windows users to encrypt their entire hard drives.

Previous versions of the company's popular encryption software could only scramble chunks of a hard drive -- basically, large files that are mounted as virtual drives after you type in the correct passphrase.

Now Windows XP users can buy what the company is calling "PGP Whole Disk encryption," which is a cleaner way to preserve the confidentiality of data on, say, an external hard drive. Alas, OS X users are out of luck for now, PGP's Stephan Somogyi says, because of the way Apple handles additional volumes in OS X.

PGP Whole Disk is part of a broader set of its Windows utilities that cost $199.

The company also announced PGP Desktop 9.0 (necessary for Tiger users who rely on PGP Disk). It's $69 for the desktop/home edition through September 30 and $99 afterwards.