Diamond Rings and More

Posts Tagged ‘hacking’

Everybody who utilizes a computer for any reason ought to take backups. Even if you just play games on your computer, you will like to keep a note of your highest score and your place in the game, but if you run a business with that computer, then backups are even more vital. They are absolutely crucial.

Data is an important tool in any business and it is necessary for an IT business – it is the earnings stream, the more vital your data is, the more you should cherish your data backups. Most individuals store their data backups on removable disks – thirty years ago it would have been on tape or 4.25 inch floppy disks; twenty years ago, it would have been on 2.5 inch disks and ten years ago until now on CD.

However, none of these media is totally trustworthy. Data on these traditional media is prone to deterioration, a sort of natural wastage. However, they can also be destroyed in a fire or by magnetic fields, be stolen or be lost. This is not actually an acceptable situation for a business that relies on its data.

So what is the answer? IT specialists have been struggling with that question for fifty years. Off-site storage is one solution. This means that you ought to make at least two backups of your data at given points during the day, place one in your office safe and send one by courier to a safe storage location owned either by yourself or by a data storage company.

This is still the system that most companies use, if they back up their data on a ordinary basis at all. It is inexpensive and at least two times as safe as storing your backup data on the office premises. After all, it is extremely unlikely that two buildings will burn down or get robbed on the same day.

However, that still depends on the data being backed up correctly. For data to get securely backed up, it should become backed up and then verified. If you have a lot of data this can become a lengthy process if you only have one or two aging PC’s in the office. If this is a fact, people frequently skip verification or only back up properly once a week.

I have been in both these predicaments. Fifteen years ago, I did not verify our office data and had three months of unusable rubbish, when our hard drive crashed, because I had not verified it and something was wrong with the back up program and ten years ago, I had a decent backup, but it was a week old and had to pay my secretary a week’s overtime to re-input that week’s data.

Nowadays, I make all my backups by the book, but by a new method. I now use a cloud drive. This sounds fanciful, but what it means is that i send my data to another company somewhere in the world automatically over the Net every day. It occurs in the background automatically. You merely set the program up, tell it what data to backup and off it goes.

This is the very best kind of data backup that I have ever found and it is cheap to free. Several businesses offer free storage up to a certain amount of bandwidth or data storage capacity. Merely enter ‘cloud data storage’ into a search engine. Now all you have to worry about is what happens if the Internet is scrapped.

Owen Jones, the writer of this piece, writes on several topics, but is currently concerned with the Microsoft Antivirus Software. If you have an interest in such software, please go over to our website now at Computer Antivirus Software Suite

If you make your money by using a computer, you ought to protect yourself against all computer disasters. If you were a taxi driver, you would take out car and public liability insurance. If you were an employer, you might take out plant and tools insurance. If you were a landlord you would take out property insurance and loss of income insurance.

But what do you do if you work on line? Well, if you work with computers, data is your most precious resource, but you cannot insure against losing it because you cannot prove that you ever had it. So, what can you do? The answer is that you need to have dependable backups and several of them.

The difficulty is that computers do not often break down so we are lulled into the false feeling of security that we can make backups tomorrow instead of right now. However, the longer that you work with IT, the more you comprehend that there are no warning signs if you are about to lose all your data, which might be your entire income stream.

For example, say you make web sites for a living and update them regularly so that the search engines find them interesting. What would happen if your hard drive crashed or if they were destroyed by a virus? You may say that you would download them from your Net host and start again, but that is not feasible, because most HTML editors will not decompile a completed website.

That would mean that you could never refresh those web sites again, so they would become less and less interesting to the search engines, so your ranking would fall and your income would plummet. And why? Because you failed to insure your business by taking adequate backups. You did not make provision for data recovery in the event of data loss.

However, no matter how often you backup your data on physical media, you will always be facing a risk because anything physical, any device is subject to failure and deterioration. CD’s do not last as long as we were promised. I have lost tons of data that I thought was safe on CD’s and hard drives are prone to fail with no notice whatsoever.

Even if you do conquer these issues of storage, what occurs if there is a fire or a thief really steals all your disks and computers? Your hardware would be insured but your livelihood, your data would be lost forever. All that hard work. Your source of earnings. Lost. Forever.

There is a different alternative and that is not to hold your data on your computer, in your office or anywhere within a thousand miles of yourself. This is called cloud storage or cloud data storage. Microsoft calls it Sky Drive and offers 25 GB of free, password-protected, storage available from anywhere in the world. This kind of storage is the ultimate in secure storage providing the best value recovery planning for computer data.

Owen Jones, the author of this article, writes on many subjects, but is currently involved with researching the best virus protection software. If you have an interest in such software, please go over to our website now at Computer Antivirus Software

Shielding your computer from viruses is getting more and |more difficult each day. While it may sound a bit paranoid, it is true that you cannot let your guard drop for one moment. Even corporate giant Microsoft has found its own systems infected on more than one occasion.

Do you remember the ‘good old days’, before the arrival of the Internet and downloadable programs? Life was simple then in terms of computer viruses. The primary way to catch a virus then was via floppy disks. By today’s standards, it used to take quite a while before a virus was able to infect a computer and slow down the system. The antivirus software of that time was usually able to identify and eradicate viruses before they caused too much damage. Additionally, computer users were fairly savvy about how to defend themselves by scanning all floppy disks before using them.

The Internet changed all that. The Internet provided a medium by which viruses could travel from host to host with blinding speed. A computer user had to start to think about email, email attachments, peer-to-peer file sharing, instant messaging, and software downloads as virus entry points. Modern viruses can attack through multiple entry points, propagate without human intervention, and take full advantage of vulnerabilities within a system or program. With technology advancing everyday, and the union of computers with other mobile devices, the potential for new types of threats also increases.

Fortunately, the development of antivirus software has kept pace with the virus threats. Antivirus software is indispensable to a computer’s ability to ward off viruses and other malicious programs. These software products are designed to guard against the ability of a virus to enter a computer through email, web browsers, file servers and desktops. Moreover, these programs offer a control feature that handles deployment, configuration and updating. A computer user should remain diligent and follow a couple of simple steps to guard against the threat of a virus:

You should evaluate your current computer security system. With the danger of a new generation of viruses being able to attack in a large number of ways, the tactic of having just one kind of antivirus software has become obsolete. You need to be certain that you have protected all aspects of your computer system from the desktop to the network, and from the gateway to the server. Consider a more comprehensive security system which encompasses several features including antivirus, firewall, content filtering, and intrusion detection. This type of system will make it more difficult for the virus to infiltrate your system.

You should install antivirus software created by a well-known, highly regarded company, because new viruses erupt daily, so it is vital that you update your antivirus software daily. Become au fait with your software’s real-time scan feature and configure it to start automatically every time you boot your computer. This will protect your system by automatically checking your computer each time it is powered up.

Set your antivirus software to scan all new programs or files no matter from where they originate from and exercise caution when opening binary, Word, or Excel documents of unknown sources particularly if they were received during an online chat or as an attachment to an email.

Make sure you perform regular backups in case your system is corrupted. It could be the only way to retrieve your data if you computer becomes infected.

There are many applications available to consumers, so with a little research, you should be able to pick the program that is right for you. Many programs provide a trial version which permits you to download the program and test its capabilities. However, be aware that some anti-virus programs can be difficult to uninstall, so as a precaution make sure you set up a System Restore point and take back-ups before installing it.

Owen Jones, the author of this article, writes on many subjects, but is currently involved with the cheap antivirus software. If you have an interest in such software, please go over to our website now at Computer Antivirus Software

To many computer users spyware, adware and computer viruses are all the same. In a way they are: they have all been sneaked onto your computer and none of them are going to do any good for you, the computer owner. They are all a royal pain in the neck.

However, there are differences between them and, as a computer owner, you might just as well know what those differences are so that you can properly make a decision how many resources you are going to devote to getting rid of them.

Spyware: spyware is like a parasite. It will get delivered to your computer via email attachments, as part of a free program or even as part of a program you paid for. Often, spyware is attached to something functional that people pass around because it is functional, humorous or pornographic.

When the ebook or email is opened, the parasitic spyware goes off and secretes itself somewhere in your computer. Spyware may do lots of things, but like all decent parasites, it is not there to injure your computer.

It is there to read your key strokes, scan your hard drives and record the sites you visit. Then, say, once a week, while the computer is idle, it sends all this information home to its creator. The creator may then use this information as he or she wants, but first they have to unravel it all. Software will do that.

The least that will occur is that the data will show that you have been searching for, say, new shoes on line and you will get heaps of spam on new shoes. One of the worst acts that could happen is that it will have read your banking details and there might be an attempt on your bank account.

Adware: adware is similar, but it is seen as very nearly legitimate. Typically, a useful program like a download accelerator will record where it has downloaded files for you from and it will report that back to its creator and you will be spammed again.

Robbery is not part of the raison d’etre of adware. Look in your cookies and you will see dozens of these little programs collecting knowledge on your every move. Most of the big names in the computer world, including Google, use Adware in the form of cookies to find out what you would like before anyone else does, so that they can be the first to serve it up to you.

Computer Viruses: include Trojans, worms and all the other forms of malware to most individuals. These are normally disruptive or destructive in nature and meant to ruin your computing or surfing experience. It is simple to understand why someone would make spyware and adware, but not viruses. Some people appear to get a kick out of causing turmoil for others.

The only manner to keep spyware, adware and computer viruses off your computer is by using powerful antivirus software and a firewall. Numerous people are happy with the amount of protection that the free Windows firewall and AV software provides.

Others use the free Windows firewall, but use a third party free AV program. Yet others buy a commercial package that has its own firewall and AV software. It really depends on the degree of protection that you are comfortable with and whether you are prepared to pay for it.

Owen Jones, the author of this article, writes on many subjects, but is currently involved with the cheap antivirus software. If you have an interest in such software, please go over to our website now at Computer Antivirus Software

New computer viruses are being generated, exposed and fought every day. These computer viruses are created often just to annoy us and to inflict chaos in our computer systems. Hereunder, I have described ten viruses recently cited as being the most prevalent and being potentially able to cause the most harm. However, new viruses are being developed daily, so this list is by no means complete. The only thing you can do is remain alert, keep your anti-virus software updated, and keep aware of the current computer virus threats.

Virus: Trojan.Lodear: A Trojan (from Trojan Horse) that attempts to download files from a distant source. It will inject a .dll file into the EXPLORER.EXE process causing system instability.

Virus: W32.Beagle.CO@mm: A mass-mailing worm that lowers security settings. It can delete security-related registry sub keys and may prevent admittance to security-related websites.

Virus: Backdoor.Zagaban: A Trojan that permits the compromised computer to be operated as a covert proxy and which may decrease network performance.

Virus: W32/Netsky-P: A mass-mailing worm which propagates by emailing itself to addresses produced from files on the local drives.

Virus: W32/Mytob-GH: A mass-mailing worm and IRC backdoor Trojan for the Windows platform. Messages sent by this worm will have the subject chosen randomly from a list including titles such as: Notice of account limitation, Email Account Suspension, Security measures, Members Support, Important Notification.

Virus: W32/Mytob-EX: A mass-mailing worm and IRC backdoor Trojan similar in nature to W32-Mytob-GH. W32/Mytob- EX runs continuously in the background, providing a backdoor server which allows a remote intruder to gain admittance and control over your computer via IRC channels. This virus propagates by sending itself to email attachments harvested from your email address book.

Virus: W32/Mytob-AS, Mytob-BE, Mytob-C, and Mytob-ER: This family of worm variations possesses similar characteristics in terms of what they are able to do. They are mass-mailing worms with backdoor functionality that can be controlled through the Internet Relay Chat (IRC) network. Furthermore, they can propagate themselves through email and through various operating system vulnerabilities such as the LSASS (MS04-011).

Virus: Zafi-D: A mass-mailing worm and a peer-to-peer worm which copies itself to the Windows system folder with the filename Norton Update.exe. It can then create a number of files in the Windows system folder with filenames consisting of 8 random characters and a DLL extension. W32/Zafi-D replicates itself to folders with names containing words like ’share’, ‘upload’, or ‘music’ as ‘ICQ 2005a new!.exe’ or ‘winamp 5.7 new!.exe’. W32/Zafi-D will also display a fake error message box with the caption “CRC: 04F6Bh” and the text “Error in packed file!”.

Virus: W32/Netsky-D: A mass-mailing worm with IRC backdoor functionality which can also contaminate computers vulnerable to the LSASS (MS04-011) exploit.

Virus: W32/Zafi-B: A peer-to-peer (P2P) and email worm that will reproduce itself to the Windows system folder as a randomly named EXE file. This worm will test for the presence of an Internet connection by trying to connect to google.com or microsoft.com. A bilingual, worm with an attached Hungarian political text message box which translates to ?We demand that the government accommodates the homeless, tightens up the penal code and VOTES FOR THE DEATH PENALTY to cut down the increasing crime. Jun. 2004, P?cs (SNAF Team)?

Owen Jones, the author of this article, writes on many subjects, but is currently involved with the network antivirus software. If you have an interest in such software, please go over to our website now at Computer Antivirus Software