Hands-on Guides

Each Hands-on Guide explains how to use a particular freeware or Open Source software tool. They highlight potential difficulties, suggest helpful tips and, most importantly, walk you through the process of configuring and using these tools securely. They include screenshots and step-by-step instructions to help you follow along.

All of this software can be installed directly from the Hands-on Guide or downloaded free of charge from the tool developer's website. In most cases, you can install a tool simply by clicking on the appropriate link at the beginning of whichever guide describes that tool, then telling your browser to Open or Run the install program. If a Hands-on Guide provides special installation instructions, you may have to save a file to your Desktop, or some other location, in order to install that tool.

The Security in-a-box toolkit also includes a section called Portable Security, where you will find 'portable' versions of a few important Security in-a-box tools. These versions are meant to be installed directly onto a USB memory stick so that you can use them from any computer.

For security reasons, you should always try to use the current version of these tools. The included version of some tools may be more recent than the version that was used to create the corresponding Hands-on Guide. In such cases, the user interface of that tool may differ differ slightly from what is shown in the Guide.