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Research Note Description:
“
Data Integrity
, is a condition that exists when data has not been accidentally or maliciously modified, altered, or destroyed in an unauthorized manner. In order to maintain data integrity during operations such as transfer, storage, and retrieval and to ensure preservation of data for their intended use, several threat types must be addressed by policy, practice, and/or security technologies.”
Data Integrity protection is vital to any computer. Loss of data integrity can cost huge amounts of time and money. Data integrity is ignored by most people, yet almost every computer suffers from loss of data integrity or in other words undetected corruption of its data. Sometimes this damage causes complete loss of a disk but mostly such damage’s goes unnoticed or the user simply reinstalls some of the software on their PC and this fixes the minor problem’s they were facing. But in some cases the user have to format the whole disk which cause lots and lots of inconvenience as well as consumption of time and money to recover the lost data.
Such problems may originate due to hardware defects, software errors, poor design concepts, internal component and telecommunications interference (noise), Unintentional Human Threats, Intentional Human Threats etc etc. To avoid such loses some users have tools like
INTEGRITY MANAGER
that can detect data corruption. PC tech support will often advice you to format the disk or reinstall software but with good data integrity protection, such drastic steps are not needed and hardware or software problems can be detected before they cause any serious damage to the disks. The key is that it's vital to have a way to make sure those programs and data you have on your PC are healthy. A good integrity checker can provide this assurance and can prevent major loss of data.
Most system managers rely on basic precautions such as a properly sized, uninterruptible power source (UPS) and instituting an offline data backup program to protect against data integrity problems resulting from hardware, software, and/or communications systems failures.
For situations where businesses cannot afford to risk the integrity of their data, they protect there data integrity by purchasing some specialized equipment which can provide additional protection to there valuable data. Systems are available, usually at increased cost, that deploy parallel processors that crosscheck each other’s output and perform end-to-end checksums on all data being transported.
The most common threat which may cause some serious problems is Unintentional Human Threats. Users who want to simply view a file but are unfamiliar with read-only viewing tools may revert to using file editors. When editors are used to view data, it is very easy to unintentionally delete or modify characters while reading a file. When deleting files, extreme care must be taken to not delete some files by mistake. This is especially true when using a wild card command. If, for example, in order to delete files abc001.dat through abc009.dat, the command “delete abc*.dat” is used, a file that should be retained called abcde.dat will also be deleted. Selecting the wrong backup tape, when doing a file restore, is a common way to corrupt data, as well. Intentional Human Threats—Intentional human threats are, unfortunately, not limited to external perpetrators. Dissatisfied or dishonest employees with access privileges and knowledge of the target system(s) pose significant threats that are much more difficult to detect.
Prevention—
the following simple precautions can significantly reduce the chances of experiencing data integrity problems.
1.Back up data and other software resources on a regular schedule, and store current copies at a secure off-site location.
2.Avoid using freeware or any other software that does not originate from a trusted source.
3.Back up data at intervals determined by the length of the recovery process.
4.Always use up-to-date virus protection software.
5.Have a properly maintained UPS and power-conditioning equipment operational at all times.
6.Enable auto-save features in system software and utilities, when available.
7.Implement and maintain auditing/detection tools capable of detecting and reporting changes to mission critical system files.
References:
http://www.stiller.com/integrit.htm
http://it.ojp.gov/documents/asp/domains/section2-3.htm
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Prof. Ashay Dharwadker