The Edge : user

The Weakest Link

Essential Computer Security — Fri, 31 Aug 2007 12:53:12 GMT

Andy Greenberg wrote an article for Forbes.com titled Accounting For Human Error, which illustrates how human beings, the users themselves, are the weakest link in the security chain. Enterprises spend millions, or even tens of millions of dollars on...(read more)

Windows Integrity Control

tonybradley — Mon, 05 Feb 2007 14:56:00 GMT

With Vista, Microsoft introduced a new security concept to help protect your computer. Rather than relying on discretionary controls, like NTFS file and folder permissions which users can assign and change, Vista also has new mandatory controls. WIC, or Windows Integrity Control (also referred to as MIC, or Mandatory Integrity Control in some circles), assigns an integrity, or trustworthiness, level to each object and uses the integrity levels to control interactions between the objects. The integrity levels are assigned by the operating system and supercede, or override, the dicretionary permissions to protect the computer system. WIC is used throughout the system, but is arguably most noticeable in the Internet Explorer Protected Mode which protects the Vista operating system from malicious web content in Internet Explorer. For more details about WIC, check out this article I submitted to SecurityFocus: Introduction to Windows Integrity Control.

Radio and TV Appearances

tonybradley — Sun, 14 Jan 2007 13:40:00 GMT

In recent months I have been contacted more frequently by the media, mostly as a result of marketing efforts for my latest book, Essential Computer Security. I was invited to guest on the IMI-TechTalk radio show at the end of November, and this past week I was invited to guest on the local Detroit Fox News morning show to discuss computer security with anchorman Alan Lee and promote my book.

Data Backup For Home PC Users

tonybradley — Fri, 05 Jan 2007 17:04:00 GMT

Companies understand the importance of data. Hardware and software can be replaced, but lost data can't. Those companies that don't truly understand the value of consistently backing up critical data are probably mandated to do so anyway by one of the various regulatory requirements such as Sarbanes-Oxley or HIPAA. Companies also have administrators that are paid to be expert in managing data and they are tasked with performing the backups. That is great for companies. What about home computer users?

Computers crash. Malware attacks. There are a wide variety of potential causes for losing data on a home computer. Years worth of digital photographs, income tax and investment information tracked in personal financial software and other such personal data is irreplaceable if lost in some sort of hard drive or data catastrophe. There are many programs available, including the backup utility built into Microsoft Windows, which you can use to back up your data. The question is- what do you need to back up? If you have 200Gb worth of data on your hard drive, the backup could take forever and be very cumbersome to manage. However, it is probable that only a small fraction of that data is truly critical or irreplaceable and needs to be backed up. The backup will be easier to manage and more efficient to perform if you pare it down to only the data that really needs to be backed up.

Microsoft has created a brief guide for home computer users to help them identify the files, or types of files, that are most likely to contain critical or personal information that needs to be backed up. For more guidance, read How to decide what data to back up