- The Good: Compact; easy to use; lots of options to secure your Web browsing and e-mail; doubles as secure, portable file storage.
- The Bad: Some of the security options can slow Web browsing, particularly when loading graphics.
- The Verdict: If you want to hide your surfing habits and e-mail from casual prying eyes, this is the easiest way to do it.
- Reviewed on: Hewlett-Packard Media Center m380n Photosmart 3 GHz Pentium 4 PC with 1GB of RAM, DVD and DVD-recordable drives, a seven-way media reader, TV-input/PVR capability, Maxtor 120GB IDE and 250GB SATA hard disks running at 7200 RPM, an HP F1703 LCD panel, a 128MB NVIDIA GeForce FX 5200 video card, and Windows XP Media Center Edition.
- Also available for: Windows PCs with a USB port.
REVIEW:
Protecting personal information is the biggest single issue most users have when using the Internet. Some want to surf anonymously, some want to transfer information without it being read by unintended parties, and others fear identity theft - either through having their messages intercepted or their keystrokes logged by a hacker. The StealthSurfer II from Stealth Ideas Inc. tackles all these problems with a gadget smaller than your thumb.
As the name suggests, this is the second generation of StealthSurfer's privacy product. The most obvious change is the hardware. The original was a basic USB memory key, whereas the StealthSurfer II is a new type of USB Flash drive with a space-saving design. It has a standard plastic shell with a USB connector at one end like an everyday Flash drive (in capacities starting at 128MB for $99 U.S. and ranging up to 1GB), but you can also pull the memory card out of this sleeve. The tiny card is about the size of a Sony MemoryStick, but it has a standard USB pinout at one end so you can still plug it into any standard USB port - gimmicky, but very neat.
Aesthetics aside, a lot has changed under the hood as well.
The original Stealthsurfer contained a secure version of Netscape, and that was about it. The new package uses Firefox for Web browsing, and has a slew of other programs included, which I'll cover in a moment.
Setup is straightforward. You plug the StealthSurfer II into a USB port on your computer, and click on the installation program when the drive appears in the Windows Explorer pane. Then you enter the default password, and within about five minutes the program will unzip and install itself on the memory key (I'm not clear why it doesn't come pre-installed instead of as a zipped file, but it just doesn't ...).
Once installed, you can change the password (which encrypts the contents of the drive, including any files you want to carry around on it), and the programs are ready to run from the USB Flash drive. They don't launch automatically when you plug the StealthSurfer II into a computer - instead, you have to open the drive's directory in Windows Explorer and launch the programs you want manually, which is a bit clumsy. An autorun program would have been a cleaner design.
As a nice touch, though, there's a quick-logout hot button that appears in the Windows toolbar, so you don't have to go searching for the "eject USB mass storage device" screen.
The programs themselves are very slick. You get versions of the Firefox Web browser, Thunderbird e-mail program, RoboForm automated on-line form filler, and the Internet Anonymizer program. All the software is optimized to run directly off the StealthSurfer II.
And that's the key to this product: The programs run off the memory key, so you don't leave any files behind on the computer you're using. That includes cookies, temp files, browsing histories, cached Web page files, and so on. In other words, you can keep the record of your surfing habits secret - ranging from where you surfed to the banking passwords you use - whether you're browsing the Web from home, work, a hotel or cyber café.
Thunderbird and Firefox are the core programs, and they work very well - as you'd expect from a browser and e-mail program these days. The main issue I ran into was performance. Text would usually pop up instantly as if I was surfing using the PC's own hard-drive-based browser, but graphics tended to be slow to load. Photos and illustrations could take anywhere from five or six seconds to half a minute to load completely, whereas browsing the same pages simultaneously on a second PC, or on the same PC's hard-drive-based browser, would bring up photos in a couple of seconds. Otherwise, both the e-mail and browser programs are stable and work just like their full desktop counterparts.
Thunderbird has e-mail encryption to keep prying eyes from intercepting your messages. But if you really want tighter e-mail security, you can also get a free Hushmail account as part of the package and run it from the StealthSurfer II. It uses stronger encryption than the POP3 Thunderbird program, and it's a Web-based e-mail system that can be accessed from any computer - just like Hotmail or Gmail, but with tighter security.
RoboForm, reviewed in-depth by globetechnology.com, is basically a secure form-filling program with three main parts, all of which are very handy. First, you create a profile with your name, mailing address and other contact information, and whenever you run into websites that ask for this information, the program will offer to fill in all the fields for you automatically.
Second, it has a secure login systems for sites that you visit regularly, such as banks, on-line publications, auction sites, and so on - anything that requires a login and password. You can store the login information for each site in the program, which protects it in a database secured with 3-DES encryption. You launch the program by providing a main password and login, and after that, it will fill in the appropriate login information automatically for every secure site you visit during that surfing session.
Third, it has a random password and login generator. Since the program remembers the information for you, it can choose really long and complicated (and more secure) random password and logins for you. These are all linked into that single login used to launch the main program, so you'll never have to remember them yourself.
Roboform is very handy, because aside from saving time on sites where you fill out passwords and logins regularly, it can also defeat keyloggers. Since it pulls the pasword and login information from a database on the USB memory key, there are no keypresses for a piece of malware to log and send back to a hacker.
Anonymizer is a neat little program that hides your IP address when you're surfing the Internet. This means nobody can tell what IP address your Web connection originates from. It also creates an encrypted link to the Internet using 128-bit SSL technology. You need to sign up for an Anonymizer account to activate this, but it's a painless process. The only issue I encountered was that it wouldn't work from behind a good firewall, such as the one at my office. The company says Anonymizer won't affect surfing speed, but for some reason I found that graphics were slowest to load when this program was running in the background.
The StealthSurfer II itself is password protected, and the files on it are encrypted using 3DES, as I mentioned earlier. If you lose the StealthSurfer, the person who finds (or steals) it will have to know your password in order to see your surfing history and RoboForm database. The encryption can also protect files you carry on the StealthSurfer - much of the USB drive's memory is available for storing personal files for transport or safekeeping.
Overall, the StealthSurfer II offers a wealth of personal security features for Internet users, yet it's easy to manage. All the programs work well together, and are easy to launch and manage. If you can click on a program icon, you can run the StealthSurfer II.
Like anything, there are ways around just about any security program, but this collection will keep all but the most persistent experts at bay. And being able to surf on public computers without leaving traces of your surfing activities is a must these days.
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