Please, Back Up Your Data!

All too often, we see clients who rarely, if ever, back up their critical data. And in all the years we’ve been repairing computers, we’ve never seen one break at a convenenient time. More often than not, your hard drive will fail at precisely the time you can least-afford to lose your data.
 
If all you use your computer for is occasional email or web browsing, a hard drive failure may not be too critical. But we’ll often go into a new client’s office and find their critical files aren’t being backed up, either locally on workstations, or on their server.
 
Even worse are those network installs we’ve encountered that don’t even include backup devices.
 
A recent issue of PC Magazine had an article on the nuts and bolts of data backup. It contained a lot of the same concepts that we’ve been preaching for eons and the highlights are worth repeating here.

• Identify what you absolutely can’t afford to lose - photographs, financial information, address book, downloaded music, etc. - and ensure that they get backed up regularly.
• For local computer and workstations, backup to compact disks if at all possible. They’re cheap, fast, safe and easy. If you have more data than will fit on a CD, go to DVD (which holds about 6 times more than a CD).  • If your files won’t fit on a DVD... think about a more professional backup system such as a REV drive from Iomega. If you have that much data, it is worth the investment in a professional backup solution to protect it.
• Determine your optimal backup schedule by asking yourself how much data would be a hardship to reproduce if it were lost.
  Those who can’t afford to lose even one day’s work should back up every day. If recreating a week’s worth is no problem, then a weekly backup may do the trick. Either way, take the time to do the backup - recreating the data will take you much longer!
• Store one copy of your data off-site. If your home or office burns down, backup disks that are sitting next to the computer won’t help you much.
• Collect the installation CDs for all of your programs and store them together. Make copies of those disks that are critical to your business and keep them off-site.
• Don’t be too quick to trash or overwrite older backups. If you encounter file troubles (data corruption or virus infection, for example), the most recent backup of that file may have the same problem.
• Multiple solutions, such as daily back-ups on CD or DVD and weekly backups on a REV drive or tape system, give you more effective recovery and better protection.
• Most consumer programs won’t copy files that are in use. Be sure to close all files before you run a backup. This is particularly important to note on server-based systems: You must invest in an open-file backup option for your backup system.
• Check backups often to make sure they’re current (open the disk and verify the date of a recently used file). All too often, we hear horror stories from people who were convinced that they were backing up properly, only to find that nothing was actually being written to the disk or tape.

Backing up your important files can be painless. The same cannot be said of losing them. Give us a call and we’ll show how to make it quick and easy.

Net Security Purr-Fected: Pictures Of Kittens Are The Unlikely New Weapon Against Online Fraud And Spam

There’s a new way to combat internet fraud, prevent spam and keep online shopping secure. But your first impressions may be that it’s not exactly high tech. It takes the form of a simple question: From a gallery of fluffy-animal snaps, can you tell which are cats and which are dogs?
 
Your answer is enough to find out whether you are human or an automated spam program, designed to send unwanted email.
 
The dog/cat question is the latest example of a security device called a Captcha, a simple puzzle that usually takes the form of a string of distorted letters and numbers.
 
Captcha stands for Completely Automated Public Turing Test to Tell Computers and Humans Apart.
 
The idea behind a Captcha is that users have to perform a task that is simple for a human but incredibly difficult for a computer. Distorting random letters and numbers makes them confusing to a computer but readable to the human eye.
 
Regular web users will be familiar with Captchas, as they are ubiquitous on shopping, email and networking sites; during initial registration and sometimes log-in, Captchas are used as an additional gateway to passwords.
 
Although a number of computer researchers have claimed that they invented the Captcha, it’s generally acknowledged that Carnegie Mellon University led the charge after being asked by Yahoo in 2000 to create a security tool to stop spammers using computer programs to set email accounts and then use these accounts to send millions of spam messages.
 
According to Luis von Ahn, a member of the original Carnegie Mellon team, “Captchas are still the best defence against many types of automated attacks, and I believe they will be used for the foreseeable future. The only ones that can be broken are the extremely primitive ones that use a constant font, and apply no distortion to the characters other than thin lines that are easy to remove automatically.”
 
But as programs are written that can read heavily distorted codes, the distortions become even more extreme. And as they do so, some of the Captchas are becoming too tricky for many humans to decipher at first attempt. More and more users are finding that they need two or three attempts before they can confirm their shopping orders or set up their new email account. So, creators of Captchas are exploring new avenues.
 
Von Ahn is the executive producer of a new project, Recaptcha.net, which uses old tomes to create new Captchas. While digitally scanning books to make them available online, character recognition software often fails to recognise a word, because of smudges or damaged paper. If von Ahn’s software can’t read it, he’s assuming that other computers will also struggle. “The words in my Captchas come directly from old books that were recently scanned, and we are using people’s answers to decipher what the words are.”
 
Picture recognition is an increasingly popular alternative. People are asked to look at a grid of images and pick the ones that have something in common - straightforward for humans but impossible for computers, as it’s difficult for computers to accurately classify images.
 
Pix Captcha (www.captcha.net), a Carnegie Mellon project, displays pictures of certain things - worms, babies and so on - and then asks people to select the corresponding noun from a drop-down menu.
 
Most altruistic is a Microsoft research project called Asirra (research.microsoft.com/asirra) - Animal Species Recognition for Restricting Access - that uses pictures of rescue-home dogs and cats from Petfinder.com. It asks you to click on the cats, rather than the shots of aardvarks, bears and dogs thrown in to baffle the computers.
 
It also helps find homes for domestic animals - each image has a tag reading “adopt me” on it.
 
Although still in the “beta” testing stage, Asirra has a database of over two million images with which it can create Captchas. It has the potential to change the way we stay secure online - and give animal lovers everywhere a dose of cuteness.
 
Adapted from The London Independent.

Malicious Software Is Spreading Through Multiple Operating Systems

“A new worm is being distributed within malicious OpenOffice documents. The worm can infect Windows, Linux and Mac OS X systems,” according to a Symantec Security Response advisory. “Be cautious when handling OpenOffice files from unknown sources.”
 
Apple’s Mac OS is not a virus-free platform, said Jan Hruska, who co-founded antivirus firm Sophos.
 
“Viruses on the Mac are here and now. They are available, and they are moving around. It is not as though the Mac is in some miraculous way a virus-free environment,” Hruska said. “The number of viruses coming out for non-Mac platforms is higher. It gives a false impression that somehow, Apple Macs are all virus-free.”
 
Once opened, the OpenOffice file, called badbunny.odg, launches a macro that behaves in several different ways, depending on the user’s operating system.
 
On Windows systems, it drops a file called drop.bad, which is moved to the system.ini file in the user’s mIRC folder. It also executes the JavaScript virus badbunny.js, which replicates to other files in the folder. On Apple Mac systems, the worm drops one of two Ruby script viruses in files respectively called badbunny.rb and badbunnya.rb.