Dirty Little Computer Viruses and How To Protect YourselfWritten by Dan Preston
Whether you have learned your lesson from a past experience with a nasty computer virus or have been pressing your luck by surfing web and downloading various files or opening those email messages sent to you by people you don’t know without any real understanding of just how vulnerable you really are each time you log onto your computer, you now have opportunity to discover what steps you can take to avoid such an annoying and many times destructive infestation. Listed below are some of guidelines you can follow in order to keep those nasty viruses from making a mess out of your computer and your life. •Purchase and install a well respected antivirus software program and be sure to set it up so that it automatically runs when computer starts up each time. •Make sure to keep your antivirus software up to date by either using automatic update feature that many come with or make it a habit to manually check at least once or twice a week for updates on your own. •Set your antivirus program to scan for potential viruses each time you open a word-processing document like ones that get sent through email. Viruses found in word-processing documents are called Macro Viruses. •When purchasing software make sure to only buy from vendors that are well known and from ones you trust. •Resist swapping data with use of floppy disks or other mobile storage devices between various computers. If exchanging programs between computers is unavoidable just make sure to scan storage device(s) for viruses before transferring data from one computer to next.
| | Some Computer Forensics BasicsWritten by Allen Butler
- Computer Forensics in a Nutshell Computer forensics are examinations of computers made during a criminal investigation. When police look into files and data on a computer during an investigation, they are using computer forensics. It is obvious that you would want to look at a suspect's computer if they are involved in a hacking or industrial espionage case where computer is being actively used to commit crime, but these are not only sorts of cases where computer forensics is used. Even if a murder case or a theft where a suspect used a computer could have information on it that is important to case. You never know where you might find information that you need for a case, and so investigators look at everything they can find. - What Computer Forensics Investigators Look At There are three basic kinds of data that a computer forensics investigator will look at when examining a computer: saved data, meta data and deleted data. The first thing that a computer forensics investigator will do before examining this data is to make a copy of hard drive. Even just looking at a file can sometimes change data or meta data, and it is important that none of original information is tampered with when using it in a criminal investigation. Making a copy of computer's hard drive allows investigator to go through all of data without having to worry that he is tampering with potential evidence. Saved data is any data that is normally accessible on a hard drive. It is all data that is saved onto hard drive. This includes things like documents, imagages, internet logs, program files, etc. This is easiest data to look at, because it involves no special working to access these files. Sometimes files might be hidden within multiple folders or using confusing file names, so examination will need to be thorough to make sure anything important to case is found. Files can also sometimes be password protected, which makes it more difficult for an investigator to open them to read them. Computer forensics investigators are trained to get around these kinds of blocks. Meta data is information that accompanies saved data. It is information that tells you about saved dat, like when a file was created, when it was last modified and when it was last accessed. This tells us when something was made, when person who created file was using it and if he had made any changes to it. This can be useful as it can help put a timeline to data investigator is looking at, and match up information for use with case.
|
