TrueCrypt is the programme that encrypts data on your hard disc; very effectively too. TrueCrypt worked then suddenly, without warning the people running it said: Forget it, go somewhere else. There may be weaknesses but we don't know what they might be.
This is disappointing but the source code is out there so people with the right background can carry on. The virtue of source-available code is that it can be checked for weaknesses, deliberate or accidental. So carry on using it is the answer. The fact that the wonderful people of TrueCrypt pointed to a programme from Microsoft is not reassuring. Gates has a track record of selling shoddy goods at grossly inflated prices. Trusting him is not the way to go.
The Gibson Research Corporation takes the very definite position that TrueCrypt is still safe to use. Indeed the Wikipedia tells us that the FBI was unable to break it. That was when crime was involved. The NSA is likely to be better at decryption but they use it in espionage cases.
Gibson Research Corporation
Yes . . . TrueCrypt is still safe to use. Although the disappearance of the TrueCrypt site, whose ever-presence the Internet community long ago grew to take for granted, shocked and surprised many, it clearly came as no surprise to the developers who maintained the site and its namesake code for the past ten years. An analysis of the extensive changes made to TrueCrypt's swan song v7.2 release, and to the code's updated v3.1 license, shows that this departure, which was unveiled without preamble, was in fact quite well planned.For reasons that remain a titillating source of hypothesis, intrigue and paranoia, TrueCrypt's developers chose not to graciously turn their beloved creation over to a wider Internet development community, but rather, as has always been their right granted by TrueCrypt's longstanding license, to attempt to kill it off by creating a dramatically neutered 7.2 version that can only be used to view, but no longer to create new, TrueCrypt volumes.
Then, leveraging the perverse and wrongheaded belief that software whose support was just cancelled renders it immediately untrustworthy, they attempted to foreclose on TrueCrypt's current and continued use by warning the industry that future problems would remain unrepaired. This being said of the latest 7.1a version of the code that has been used by millions, without change, since its release in February of 2012, more than 27 months before. Suddenly, for no disclosed reason, we should no longer trust it?
TrueCrypt ex Wiki
TrueCrypt is a discontinued source-available freeware utility used for on-the-fly encryption (OTFE). It can create a virtual encrypted disk within a file or encrypt a partition or (under Microsoft Windows except Windows 8 with GPT) the entire storage device (pre-boot authentication).On 28 May 2014, the TrueCrypt website announced that the project was no longer maintained and recommended users to find alternative solutions.
Alternatives include two freeware projects based on the TrueCrypt code, VeraCrypt and CipherShed, as well as numerous commercial and open-source products.