Many folks don’t realize it, but the easiest way to hack a database is just to steal a database backup, and then restore it at your leisure on your home PC (or wherever). A similar hacking incident was reported a few months ago (unfortunately I can’t find the news article at the moment), where was able to get their hands on sensitive info by grabbing a copy of a DB backup.
Another problem with DB backups (SQL Server, anyway), is that there’s lots of unused space in the backup file(s). So I wrote this little command-line program to take care of both problems at once by both encrypting and zipping a file you specify as a command-line parameter. Since this is a command-line app, you can easily include it in backup/restore scripts.
The download I’ve provided includes the source and binaries (binaries are in the bin\debug folder) – since this is a .Net application .Net 1.1 is required. Also included is Gerry Shaw’s freely available Zip library from OrganicBit.com, which is required for zipping and unzipping files.
DB Encrypt ‘n’ Zip can be downloaded here. Consider this an unsupported program, particularly since I’m providing the source code.
