The fast evolution of computer networks brought fantastic developments for communication and connection capacities.
We can easily see this evolution while observing the Internet, first a restricted network and now a complex and global network, where we can do a simple mail exchange or complex and elaborated financial transactions.
But, we also have the dark side of this fantastic environment: threats like virus, worms and Trojan horses, scanning, spoofing, sniffing or snooping, and so many others became the nightmare of all organizations.
Indeed, the technology can play for and against us.
A good way to make the technology works for us is using Packet Inspection. This is a tool frequently used to sniffing networks, looking for password and breaches, but information security professionals can use it to do exactly the opposite: protect the network.
With a good Packet Analyzer you can generate information about your integrated information systems, supporting the system administrator to find and solve the problems in a quick and efficient manner. It’s possible to identify attacks, non-authorized access to systems and malicious behaviors. In other words, with a good inspection solution your organization will be able to see and analyze everything that hits your network.
You can prevent problems and also reconstruct network sessions, providing the needed information for Network Forensics. It’s when the hunter became the hunted: you will be using the same method malicious threats use to put your business under risks to defend your organization.
Do you want to know what a Packet Inspection is? Watch this video for more information: Deep Packet Inspection explained or read here at Wikipedia.
Data Recovery
Every computer has storage files devices. These devices can be: Hard drives, notebook’s hard drive, CDs, DVDs, diskettes, Zip drive, memory card, pen drives, etc.
In these devices you can find the operational system e all information used and archived in your computer.
But, the truth is, these devices are subjects to failures and accident that can cause the lost of your valuable files: mechanical failures, electric failures, virus action, bad system functioning, information deletion, format, problems with water, fire, smoke, and others.
Data Recovery is the effort to rescue info lost in those or similar situations.
Insecure Data
Our data is not always secure and sometimes is too late to do something to protect them. That’s why Data Recovery business is growing so fast around the world with some many companies offering solutions.
The truth is we never imagine it can happen with us. “I ended up with nothing” – One day, while starting her computer, a friend heard a strange sound. With a burning smell, her computer turned off. She couldn’t turn her computer on again, a Pentium III with 2 years.
Even after installing new mother board, sound card and power supply, her computer didn’t turn on. Hard drive was removed and installed in another commuter, but, as you can imagine, she couldn’t access her data.
In that hard drive, she was keeping her PhD papers, and all her classes. No hard copies, no backups. Since now she can’t access her data, she is now looking for a company that can help her, to at least try to salve some of those files.
But the question is: are these files more valuable than the price for an eventual data recovery? And if yes, which values and services she should look in a data recovery company?
Information on Risk
I’m pretty sure that my friend’s history is totally familiar to you. The good thing is nowadays internet can provide valuable resources to help you with your data recovery. An example is this data recovery blog from DTIData, a great site with a lot of resources, where you can find information about how to recover your hard drive, your exchange server, your NTFS, your iPod, or even raid data recovery.
But how it happens? Why suddenly your hard drive doesn’t work anymore? How can we prevent this situation? Is it possible recovering any data? Is my data impossible to be recovered?
A future article will explain.
With a range of clients that can go from The Pentagon to the home user, they have everything for security surveillance, since External and Internal security cameras, CCTV cameras to PC security systems.
Are you trying to decide what type of website hosting you’ll use?
Well, let’s know our choices:
A web hosting service is a type of Internet hosting service that allows individuals and organizations to provide their own websites accessible via the World Wide Web. Web hosts are companies that provide space on a server they own for use by their clients as well as providing Internet connectivity, typically in a data centre.
Types of hosting services:
Free web hosting service: is free, (sometimes) advertisement-supported website hosting, and is extremely limited when compared to paid hosting.
Shared web hosting service: one’s Web site is placed on the same server as many other sites, ranging from a few to hundreds or thousands. Typically, all domains may share a common pool of server resources, such as RAM and the CPU.
Managed Dedicated Servers: the user gets his or her own Web server and gains full control over it (root access for Linux/administrator access for Windows); however, the user typically does not own the server.
A shared web hosting service or virtual hosting service is a form of web hosting service where more than one instance of the same web service is hosted on a single physical server. This is generally the most economical option for hosting as many people share the overall cost of server maintenance.
Disadvantages:
- Reduced security due to many sites on one server.
- Restrictions on traffic volume.
- Restricted database support.
- Restricted software support.
In other hand, Managed Dedicated Servers, or managed hosting service is a type of Internet hosting where the client leases an entire server not shared with anyone. This is more flexible than shared hosting, as organizations have full control over the server(s), including choice of operating system, hardware, etc.
Advantages:
- Good for large business.
- Good for high traffic.
- Multiple domain names.
- Powerful email solutions.
- Powerful database support.
- Strong (unlimited) software support.
Now you can choose wisely. Next time we’ll talk about how to choose a good domain name.
The most annoying thing about air plane travel is where to park you car. Airport parking is always too expensive and crowded.
But, if you are going to Gatwick in London, could be a great idea stop at Gatwick Parking website. They have great offers there: pre-booking, Gatwick Hotel Parking room’s prices cheaper than the parking alone and - the best thing - room’s televisions displaying the departures board. Isn’t it cool?
So, since you are saving your time parking at airport, you can waste it having some fun: try this Parking Game, and try to park the car in less than 60 seconds. I couldn’t.
Problems with your Hard Drive? Lost all your pictures in your memory card? There’s still a chance.
Zero Assumption Recovery (or ZAR Recovery) is a tool to recover lost data in a drive unit. The best thing with this tool is you don’t need to be a computer expert to use it. It’s easy to use and all process can be done automatically.
How to use it:
Selecting a drive to recover:
Selecting a volume to process:
Analysing a volume:
Choosing files to recover:
Things you can do with Zero Assumption Recovery:
Recover FAT16, FAT32 and NTFS.
Copy a hard drive sector by sector.
Or, insert 0’s (zero) in all sectors. (This one is for those that don’t want to recovery anything, if you know what I mean)
There are some new features as RAD0 and RAID5 support and experimental support for Linux ext2.
Demo version limitations:
- You can recover just 4 folders
- You can record the information scanned in drive unit, but you can load it again.
Zero Assumption Recovery is a tool really great for professional and amateurs photographers (like me), because it can recover digital pictures from you memory stick.
Zero Assumption Recovery works with several memory card formats (CompactFlah, MemoryStick, SmartMedia, etc), since they can be opened by operating system. Supports several file formats: GIF, JPEG, TIFF, CRW, MOV, WAV.
It has a friendly interface, self-explanatory, step-by-step, to help you with the best solution for your problem.
When you work with Computer Forensic, the first thing you notice is if the data is compromised. You will face all kind of situation: since a disaster recovery, or a simple damage data recovering in several types of devices: hard drives, floppy disks, USB drives, memory cards.
In this article I’ll talk about a recovery tool for Windows, since Unix users don’t have problems like this frequently, given the Unix systems’ nature.
Active@ File Recovery
You can download it here. Since it’s a demo tool, there are a few limitations such as you just can recover 65kb file size.
Lab
1.Download and install Active@ File Recovery in your computer.
2.Search for deleted files
3.Recover a file (until 65kb)
4.Verify the file integrity.
As you can see, this file recovery software is really easy to use, intuitive and fast. It works with the following file systems: FAT, FAT32 and NTFS.
You can use it to recover IDE, SATA, SATA II and SCSI Hard Drives, floppy disks and also CompactFlash, SmartMedia, Sony MemoryStick, USB Hard Drive and USB Flash Memory.
You will find the following features:
File Recovery - Recovers deleted files and folders from an emptied recycle bin, as a result of bypassing the Recycle Bin (for example when using [Shift]+[Delete]), files that have been lost by formatting, damaged by virus attack, a malicious program, or a power failure.
Partition Recovery - Data recovery after disk partitions loss / format / damage (just with Active@ File Recovery Professional).
Photos Recovery - Recovers photos, pictures deleted from flash media, or lost due to formatting a memory card.
Unbootable System Recovery – Active@ File Recovery Enterprise version installation package contains a CD/DVD ISO image that you can burn to get a bootable CD or DVD with a lightweight version of Windows Vista (c) running in RAM (WinPE 2.0).
It’s a valuable tool for home users, enterprises and professionals: the full licensed software starts at U$29,95 for the Standard version.
When Techie guys talk about backup, maybe you don’t know exactly what they are talking about. So, let me explain a bit about backup.
Backup is a copy you made from a device to another with recovering purposes, in case you have problems with your original files. That’s an essential procedure for those using computers and others digital devices, such as digital cameras and MP3 players. Nowadays, most known backup types are CR-ROM, DVD, HD and Magnetic Tapes.
All important Operational systems have tools to implement your backup, but, there are thousands of powerful softwares out there, to create and restore your data.
Here’s an excellent article explaining all types of backup, history, and what type of backup is the best for you.
The following graphic shows a Backup Time Line, covering the most important backup strategies in the history. (click in the picture to maximize it)
You will learn how Punch Card Backups are a Reference Point in Backup History, and why they were replaced by Magnetic Tapes and Tape Backup.
The article also feature Backup using hard-drives and floppy disks, until our times, when people are using flash drives, Blu-Ray and HD-DVD to keep their data safe.
The article is a time travel, and you will learn when network backups began to be used, and why online backups are growing so fast.
It’s a interesting article for techie and non-techie people.
You were there, just finishing your presentation for the company’s board next day. But, suddenly, the phone rung, and you w2ent to the next room to pick up the phone.
A few seconds later, you came back, just to realize that you baby pushed the Del key. With some many keys to push, he pushed just the Del Key! Worse, you use to configure your trash can to delete all files without warning.
Never happen to you? Well, the circumstances may vary, but we all had moments like this.
No, this is not a tragedy as you may think. There are a dozen of software out there to help you in situation like these.
One of them is Handy Recovery.
Handy Recovery is a data recovery software designed to recover deleted files , accidentally or not.
The program supports FAT 12/16/32, NTFS and NTFS 5 + EFS file systems.
You also can see the probability of successful recovery for each file.
You can can recover files from deleted and formatted partitions or create disk images for deferred recovery. It also features in-depth disk scanning for certain file types. File filtering by name, mask, date and size is available. You can recover the full branch of folders tree containing selected files and folders. With Handy Recovery you can browse the content of your disk like you do it in Windows Explorer. The only difference is that you see deleted files and folders along with the regular ones.
So, remember, try to be more careful when you’re thinking about to delete some file. And have a Data Recovery Software always at hand.
You already know those Mac widgets and now Windows Vista widgets. But now we are living the “Web Widgets Fever”. Widgets are little pieces of dynamic content, and it has been spread through several sites and blogs.
Widgets has several functionalities, like marketing, show the weather, site statistics, and others.
Pros:
Well, it’s a clean, with no logo or ads and you have the option to remove the link for the iBegin homePage.
Cons:
Works only for USA and Canada.
For those security paranoids, yes, I also think it’s not a good idea share a script generated by another user in you website.
So, I have to recommend you to always check the widgets’ origin before use it, since download and install widgets is one of the most known methods to spread malware.
Disclosure: This review was sponsored.
Data Recovery
Our long time sponsor 
