Dalunara

Information Technology is the lifeline of most organizations today, and as such a disrupted information system can cause your company to lose market share and eventually bring it to its knees. 94% of companies without a tested crisis plan go out of business after a severe loss of service for two weeks or more. We are so bound as a global community that a disaster in a single major city results in significant ripple effects around the world.

Cyberterrorism, weather direct or indirect, is an issue all businesses should anticipate and arrange for backup plans. Depending on the size of the company, backups of the backup plan may need to be considered.

Politically charged events frequently unleash a nest of virus’, worms and Trojan horses on the Internet, and with increasing intensity. In one day, the current Nimda virus generated one hundred times the traffic that the code red virus took three days to do.

A group setup by the federal government to counter Cyberterrorism released a report stating that “A personal computer and a simple telephone connection to an Internet service provider anywhere in the world are enough to cause a great deal of harm. The right command sent over a network to a power generating station’s control computer could be just as effective as a backpack full of explosives, and the perpetrator would be harder to identify and apprehend.”

To protect your business in the event of a disaster you need to identify the mission critical information streams that need to be protected. This may include both print material and computer hardware and software.

BACKUP YOUR DATA

Minimizing the loss of valuable documents or data can be accomplished quite easily by performing regularly scheduled backups. It is absolutely essential that OFF-SITE copies of backups be kept. This will assure quick recovery from disasters.

Backups may be done using a variety of medias, such as, floppy disks , zip disks, re-writeable cd’s, and removable hard drives. The type of media you use will depend on the quantity of data being stored.

Larger companies may also consider installing “mirror” servers, which allow the same real time information being kept in different locations. Consideration should also be given to outsourcing applications to ASPs (Application Service Providers) which have mirrored data centers.

Any paper documents which are considered critical should also be backed up with the help of a scanner and stored off-site. Myriads of paper documents were strewn all over New York following the WTC disaster. Many of the organizations and companies affected have no idea of what they have lost or even how to recover missing files. Some of which have irreplaceable information and signatures.

ANTI-VIRUS SOFTWARE

A good anti-virus software is essential in your counter terrorism arsenal. It will offer continuous protection and automatically scans all file inputs, outputs, downloads, program executions, and other system-related activities to help prevent virus penetration. If a virus is discovered, you will have the option to clean or delete the infected file.

FIREWALLS / DETECTION NETWORKS

Firewalls screen all communications to a system, including e-mail messages, which may carry logic bombs. The term “firewall” is a relatively generic term for methods of filtering access to a network. They may come in the form of a computer, router or other communications device, or in the form of a network configuration.

The services and access that are permitted to each user are defined by firewalls. One method is to screen user requests to check if they come from a previously defined domain or Internet Protocol (IP) address. Another method is to prohibit Telnet access into the system.

Here are a few key things to remember in order to protect yourself from Cyberterrorism:

i. All accounts should have passwords and the passwords should be unusual, difficult to guess, and alphanumeric where possible.

ii. Change the network configuration when defects become known.

iii. Check with venders for upgrades and patches. iv. Audit systems and check logs to help in detecting and tracing an intruder.

v. If you are ever unsure about the safety of a site, or receive suspicious email from an unknown address, don’t access it. It could be trouble.

TRACING SOFTWARE

There are software companies that create products designed to trace exactly where anyone connecting to your network is coming from. Giving you detailed information on the registered owner’s name, address, etc. Greater possibility of detection always reduces the incidence of crime.

PROTECTION SUITES

Click here:http://www.irieisle-online.com/cyberterrorism for a suite of online services which combine a number of protection strategies.

Today’s commercial off-the-shelf software is riddled with holes. Microsoft products in particular, seem to be targeted. A recent Gartner Group report strongly suggests that changing from Microsoft’s Internet Server would be a positive step. Software makers should design more secure products, which should be shipped to consumers pre-configured with high security settings. Such efforts will probably mean higher costs and slower progress in the short term but will pay off in the long term.

There are no foolproof ways to protect a system, as completely secure system can never be accessed by anyone. Your organization’s classified information can be kept on machines with no outside (internet/intranet) connection, as a form of prevention of Cyberterrorism. In the end, the onus of fighting Cyberterrorism is really on each company or organization. The cost to protect your data will be a small fraction of what will be lost if your information systems are attacked or accidentally damaged.

One innovative technological system considered to be truthfully interesting is Gas Fire Suppression. For me, it the most relevant case of fire suppression engineering for homes, offices and funds. How they work out to break fires is what establishes them truly unmatched and remarkable.

Two things are needed for a fire to come about. First is the ignitable material and oxygen is the second. Taking Up one out is a very intelligent and competent method of keeping fires and preventing it from spreading. It is in this assumption that the Gas Suppression system is built upon. When fires come about, what it does is confining the quantity of oxygen in the affected region. Without oxygen, the fires ability to stay incinerating even when there are ignitable stuffs around is greatly diminished. As a result, the fire can’t fan out and destroy whatever it can get hold of with.

Gas Suppression is not mussy as in the case of water and foam fire extinguishers. When water or foam fire extinguishers are used, they leave the area really dirty. They will leave residue later on which you involve to wash and take away. When employed, foam and water extinguishers usually damage electronic and electrical facilities, documents and pieces of furniture. It would be very disheartening and irritating to observe that what they protected from combusting, they ruined anyway. It is amusing to conceive that the very substance you used to curb the fire is also the substance that breaks the materials you preserved the fire from ruining.

Dependent on the region you want to establish the fire suppression system in, you can utilize wall mounted gas cylinders for small regions. Full-pipe installations are employed for huge areas. In average, Gas Suppression does not take big quantity of space for its installation. Before anything else, fix first the size of the region you wish to be protected. For greatest effects, confer with fire officials and professionals regarding the topic.

Getting into circumstance these features and profits, I think that Gas Suppression is the better fire system technology purchasable.

Five years ago, things were simple on the web – you pretty much had just the one password to store for your email account. These days though it’s not uncommon to have 10 or 20 passwords created for innumerable web services you’ve signed up to. So what happens? Lots of people tend to use the very same password for all or nearly all the services they’ve signed up to. Some people may not think their Facebook member account as being majorly vital, but it is if you’re using the same password as you are for your bank account. Sure, the convenience of having to remember just a single password is compelling, but what if an individual gets their hands on that single password? That’s right, they potentially have access to all of your accounts that share that same password. And if you think they don’t know the other online services you’ve signed up to, they don’t need to. They can run web application programs which screen literally thousands of online services against your account name/password pairing that they already have.

It’s a problem, but it’s easily remedied. The truth is, you don’t need to store each and every username/password. Why? Your browser can remember this information. Be it your Yahoo Login or Email password. Just ask your browser to store each account name/password, and then setup a master password just in case a person else gets physical access to your computer. If they do have such access, they must key in the master password in order to login to any of the services you’ve signed up to. In other words, you can sign up to hundreds of services, and merely have to actually remember one single password : your browser’s master password (achieving what you desired to do in a secure way – necessitating in just one password.

When creating passwords, make them random and long, for example K94545Dcd which is a mix of lower and upper case characters and numbers. As it’s not required to remember them, be as obscure as you like. Whatever you do, don’t use normal words as your password, as these are easy to discover for 3rd parties.

I have been surfing for a home alarm system for 3 months now and I finally stumbled into the system that seems to fit my bungelow, my wife and kids and our lives.

We looked through plenty of different security companies to find the lowest cost choice as opposed to the priciest selection. I must say, that I was sad with most of the sites we searched at but one stood out above all the others and that was http://www.familyhomesecurity.com. Their monitoring info was fantastic, eye opening and edifying. I wish they were a company that established security systems themselves because I know it would be done meticulously and with lots of attending to detail.

What made it a extreme experience? Well, we got a housebreakings five weeks ago that wasn’t very fun. Fortuitously, we were outside of town and they simply got jewelry and dollar bills. Now there are babies in the household and a plenty more worthwhile stuff like computing devices, electronics, and above all – family and family memories and photographs. We simply preferred to find the easiest home security system that we could all utilize and feel safe with. It was emphatically time to get one this week.

So, how did the family determine the powerful home security system? We started up by searching ’security system’ on the search engines, then grazed through entirely of the web sites on the starting page. A lot of them were junk…and I was sorry about that. Everybody I love says Yahoo is the greatest…in any event, subsequently looking all over those sites we couldn’t receive what we were searching for. We didn’t require a poor sales procedure and we didn’t want to imagine a good deal about it. Near all of these sites were abrasive sales pitches – I wanted info!

Several of the businesses we considered were Brinks, ADT, GE and Pinnacle. All of them seem to utilise corresponding alarm systems…and we finally finished with a Pinnacle Security system after using the good selective information received at homesecurityguru and www.FamilyHomeSecurity.com.

It’s decent to consider wonderful clarifying web sites out there on the subject of protection systems.

Good luck finding the right one for you!

When you talk to a seasoned webmaster, he/she will always
tell you to backup your website files since the server you
are hosted on will always let you down when least expect
it.

I remember it happened to me when my webhost went down for
about 4 hours at the same time I just launched a massive
(and costly) marketing campaign. It’s really frustrating
to see it happen when I need it to be up and running.

As a webhosting reseller, I experienced one time how my
server is advertised to be backed up daily but when the
server got fried by surging electric current by accident,
my hosting partner cannot recover even the backup harddisk!

Not only did I lose my websites hosted on that server, I
also lost my customers who hated me for what had happened.
It’s a nightmare you wouldn’t want to happen to you.

Today, many webmasters still disregard the value of
backups especially those who are just starting online.

They rely solely on their hosts to backup their websites
but little did they know that not many hosts are not
backing up databases but only the website files, scripts,
images and settings.

The MYSQL databases are not considered to be included in
their backup service. Yet this is an important component
of any website especially those used in business. Imagine
a forum getting back to square one, a mailing list that
has been wiped out or customers that cannot login because
the system cannot find their data. These are just few
examples of how you can lose your online business if you
forget the backup task.

Most hosting control panel programs like CPanel, which is
leading in the world today in terms of server dominance,
has a backup utility that you can use anytime. This is a
manual process where you have to login to Cpanel, click on
the backup page and the download link to the backup files.

This backup activity, although time consuming will ensure
that you have available website files to restore even when
a server problem gets worse thereby decreasing downtimes
and headaches on your part. Recreating website files and
databases from scratch takes much much longer.

Believe me I know. “Been there, done that.”

As a webmaster, you should at least backup your websites
once a week and for your MYSQL databases at least thrice a
week. You can also relate this backup procedure to the
frequency with which you update your websites and
databases..

For example, if you are changing your webpages daily or you
have dynamically generated pages, then you should backup
those changes daily. If you websites or databases change
less frequently, then you can backup less frequently. In
this case, weekly or monthly backups will do.

Backup procedures are not to be taken for granted. This
should become part of your regular activities as a
webmaster to make sure your site is safe and insured from
any eventualities. You should treat backing up files
seriously.

Believe me, you will be thankful you did this when the
times get rough.

If you care about your websites and all the things in it,
backup regularly and completely. It’s one webmaster task
you should never miss.

Manny R. Jao II is self-taught webmaster whose aim
is to improve the lives and working habits of other
netrepreneurs just like him. He is the developer
and owner of the first automatic backup software
for CPanel-powered websites named CPSiteSaver
which you can see at

http://www.cpsitesaver.com

As an IT Security Consultant I have observed there are many reasons for the spread of viruses and malware across the Internet. The primary reason is the lack of security on machines connected to the Internet, let me explain. There are two divisions here, the first being systems owned by medium to large businesses and the second being small office and home systems. The security difference between the two is radically different. As a whole the larger organizations have much better security.

There are several reasons for this. First and foremost these organizations have learned through painful experience the cost of not being secure. They realize that although security can be expensive it is much more expensive to be insecure. The larger companies for the most part now implement corporate controlled antivirus, antispyware and antispam software that scans for viruses, adware, spam and spyware as traffic enters the network. This way the malware are caught before they ever reach the users PC. The PCs themselves will also run client versions of things like Norton Antivirus Corporate Edition which are continually scanning the PCs for any viruses or other malware that may have been introduced to the PC directly by the user.

The larger companies also have multiple layers of Firewalls and Intrusion Detection Systems guarding their networks. While the average large company has pretty good security most computers in small office and homes have poor security. Many if they even have antivirus software do not update it. Very few if any will have antispam, antispyware or antiadware software. So they literally have no protection against viruses, adware, spyware or spam. Because many of these devices which make up a large percentage of the devices on the Internet do not have protection they are usually infected by every type of malware and because of the viral nature of malware they spread it to any PCs that they have access to.

For example friends, relatives, business associates etc. who are also not likely to be protected and then pass the virus or other malware on to anyone they have access to and the cycle continues exponentially until within a few days it’s covered the planet and tens of millions of computers. The key is to secure our homes and small businesses. The main reasons people don’t protect themselves is because they think the cost is too high and they don’t think it will happen to them. Of course they are wrong on both counts.

It will happen to everyone who is on the Internet. If you think your machine has not been affected by spyware, adware, spam and viruses you are wrong. The cost of not being secure is far higher than the cost of a reasonable amount of security. There are many free and inexpensive software packages that do a great job of securing the average home or small office. Even if you have to pay someone to install and configure it the overall cost is still comparatively low. For more information on how to make your computers secure visit http://security.gigapages.net

Paul Stapleton is an Sr. IT Security Consultant to many fortune 500 companies around the world. Please visit http://security.gigapages.net or e-mail info@gigapages.net

Someone recently told me, “You would have to be a stupid to lose your personal information.” While I respectfully responded to this person in the moment, the comment has stuck with me. I present on Identity Theft all over the Western United States, and thought I would respond to this particular individual in writing.

There are multitudes of ways to lose your personal information. You have undoubtedly heard of many of them. Fake web sites, data theft, stealing people’s trash, stealing people’s outgoing mail, check fraud, etc., are just a few of the possibilities for loss of information. Job ads are also being used for Identity Theft. Monster.com ranks fake companies posing as real companies on their web site among their biggest problems.

So, to you who think that it could never happen to you, you might want to read this next sentence twice. No matter how good you are, no matter how vigilant, no matter how much you shred or tear, no matter how many times you go to the post office so that you don’t put outgoing mail in your home mailbox, regardless of how well you can hide in your home, there is no 100% effective defense against Identity Theft. Let me say that again, in case you don’t read it twice. There is NO 100% effective method to defend yourself against identity theft.

Here’s an example of why. Let’s say you want to get health insurance, or auto insurance, or finance a car, etc. etc. etc. Let’s say for purposes of this example that you are trying to get health insurance through your company. This is a relatively simple process, right? Fill out the form, and wait to get the insurance cards in the mail.

What you may not realize is that the insurance agent has taken the form you filled out and submitted it for group health. It is submitted to three different companies for underwriting. So now, the insurance agent and the insurance company has the information from you, the three companies supplying the insurance coverage have the information on you, AND all of the employees at all four points have access to the information. Think about how many employees that might be.

That information is often then passed on to a data warehouse like ChoicePoint, and anyone who has access to ChoicePoint now has access to that information. Who has access to ChoicePoint? I think with the recent news articles, the more appropriate question is, who doesn’t have access to ChoicePoint?

The information is also submitted to your MIB (Medical Information Bureau) file. Anyone who has access to the MIB files, now has access to all of that information. Who has access to the Medical Information Bureau records? Anyone, at any hospital around the United States, who has even a small amount of clearance, has access to the Medical Information Bureau records.

According to John Gardner, co-author or Chicken Soup for the Entrepreneurial Soul, “This makes the Identity Theft Shield, along with a Pre-Paid Legal Services Membership, an absolute must for anyone that’s breathing.”

So to you, sir, who more or less said to me, “You’d have to be stupid to become a victim of Identity Theft!” I wish you my best. If you want to continue thinking that shredding your information is going to protect you, then for you I respectfully choose a phrase used by my friend Larry Smith. “Sometimes, you just can’t fix stupid.”

Jonathan Kraft is Colorado’s foremost expert on computer-related Identity Theft. He has been helping employers and employees to protect themselves from the issues surrounding Identity Theft since long before identity theft reached today’s epidemic proportions. To learn how Mr. Kraft can protect you or your company against the effects of Identity Theft, please call 877 825-7119, or email mailto:jkraft@strive4impact.com. You can also find out more online at http://www.strive4impact.com/idt

Known by several different names, from spyware to malware or internet parasites, surveillance applications are installed on your system to monitor your internet activities and reveal your surfing patterns and purchasing habits. Spyware also extracts email addresses, hijacks browsers and records credit card numbers, bank accounts and password information.

The information gathered by a spyware application is sent back to the intruder who typically uses it to bombard you with pop up and email advertisements. More serious consequences occur when credit and bank information is obtained by spyware and used for identity theft or credit card fraud. Spyware also compromises the fast and efficient functioning of your computer as it builds up and uses the system’s resources. Computer crashes occur with extreme infections which can lead to malfunctions in your registry keys and memory.

To avoid spyware and adware and protect your privacy users must be cautious when surfing the internet. Beware of freeware and shareware programs as they usually install spyware as well, without the user’s knowledge. Install and regularly use a good spyware scan and removal tool. An effective anti-spyware program will detect and remove all possible infected files.

The scanner should perform a deep system scan in order to catch files infected that usually go unnoticed.

Most spyware scanners have a removal feature as well but for those that do not a list of detected spyware files is still complied at the end of the scan. This list given by any spyware tool tells the details of that particular spyware as well as its location on your computer. If there is not removal feature on your program you can try manually deleting them.

Mitch Johnson is a successful freelance author that writes regularly for http://www.1st-in-remove-spyware.com/, a site that focuses primarily on spyware detection software, as well as tips on how to avoid spyware from popping up on your computer. His articles have also been featured on related spyware sites such as,
http://www.best-in-spyware-detection.com/ as well as http://www.best-sypware-removal-reviews.com/