Defense strategies and safekeeping, ways to defend against potential threats

Defense strategies and safekeeping, ways to defend against potential threats

A firewall can either be software-based or hardware-based and is used to help keep a network secure. Its primary objective is to control the incoming and outgoing network traffic by analyzing the data packets and determining whether it should be allowed through or not, based on a predetermined rule set.

Data leakage prevention solution is a system that is designed to detect potential data breach incidents in timely manner and prevent them by monitoring data while in-use (endpoint actions), in-motion(network traffic), and at-rest (data storage) ^[1]. In data leakage incidents, sensitive data is disclosed to unauthorized personnel either by malicious intent or inadvertent mistake. Such sensitive data can come in the form of private or company information, intellectual property (IP), financial or patient information, credit-card data, and other information depending on the business and the industry.

The most common "data recovery" scenario involves an operating system (OS) failure (typically on a single-disk, single-partition, single-OS system), in which case the goal is simply to copy all wanted files to another disk. This can be easily accomplished with a Live CD, most of which provide a means to mount the system drive and backup disks or removable media, and to move the files from the system disk to the backup media with a file manager or optical disc authoring software.

Another scenario involves a disk-level failure, such as a compromised file system or disk partition, or a hard disk failure. In any of these cases, the data cannot be easily read. Depending on the situation, solutions involve repairing the file system, partition table or master boot record, or hard disk recovery techniques ranging from software-based recovery of corrupted data to hardware replacement on a physically damaged disk. If hard disk recovery is necessary, the disk itself has typically failed permanently, and the focus is rather on a one-time recovery, salvaging whatever data can be read.

In a third scenario, files have been "deleted" from a storage medium. Typically, the contents of deleted files are not removed immediately from the drive; instead, references to them in the directory structure are removed, and the space they occupy is made available for later overwriting. In the meantime, the original file contents remain, often in a number of disconnected fragments, and may be recoverable.

The Encrypting File System (EFS) on Microsoft Windows is a feature introduced in version 3.0 of NTFS^[1] that provides file system-level encryption. The technology enables files to be transparently encrypted to protect confidential data from attackers with physical access to the computer.

In the maintenance of file systems, defragmentation is a process that reduces the amount of fragmentation. It does this by physically organizing the contents of the mass storage device used to store files into the smallest number of contiguous regions (fragments). It also attempts to create larger regions of free space using compaction to impede the return of fragmentation. Some defragmentation utilities try to keep smaller files within a single directory together, as they are often accessed in sequence.

Defragmentation is advantageous and relevant to file systems on electromechanical disk drives. The movement of the hard drive's read/write heads over different areas of the disk when accessing fragmented files is slower, compared to accessing the entire contents of a non-fragmented file sequentially without moving the read/write heads to seek other fragments.

Disk Cleanup

Disk Cleanup (cleanmgr.exe) is a computer maintenance utility included in Microsoft Windows designed to free up disk space on a computer's hard drive. The utility first searches and analyzes the hard drive for files that are no longer of any use, and then removes the unnecessary files. There are a number of different file categories that Disk Cleanup targets when performing the initial disk analysis:

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  Compression of old files
  
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  Temporary Internet files
  
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  Temporary Windows file
  
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  Downloaded program files
  
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  Recycle Bin
  
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  Removal of unused applications or optional Windows components
  
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  Setup log files
  
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  Off-line files
  

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  Update operating system
  

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  Don’t safe logon information
  

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  Don’t enter sensitive information to public computer
  

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  Don’t leave your computer unattended
  

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  Avoid opening email attachments that comes unexpectedly
  

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  Beware downloading
  

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  Backup files