Detecting intrusions and being prepared

Hacking has been one of the most popular subjects with the readers of this blog. With the issue being of worry to the vast majority of Internet users, I felt that it is time to start exploring some software products that would help you identify any intrusions into your system.

Going back to an article from last week entitled Are you being hacked? we started exploring the Foundstone Website which provides us with quite a few useful tools. In this article, we’ll be exploring a few of the most useful and simple tools and see how these can help us identify any wrongdoings that are happening on our system.

Are you being hacked?

It is a known fact that a good hacker might go unnoticed, however, it is also acknowledged that humans at some point commit mistakes. Identifying whether your machine is being hacked is no easy feat but it is an achievable target.

Whilst some hackers do this as a hobby, many consider hacking as an achievement to their efforts and therefore would be more intrigued to hack a fully-stealth system rather than the normal home user machine. Unfortunately, there’s no limit to evil and everyone is subject to a hacking attempt once their machine connects to a network or the Internet.

Passwords protect you. Do you protect them?

One of the most priced assets for a business is its data. Businesses collect all sorts of data from market segment analysis to future strategies. What happens if these fall into the wrong hands? This doesn’t only apply for businesses but also for individual users.

This is a question that we pose on a regular basis, not only for data but for everything that surrounds us. Data obviously is more critical because it probably contains information that we don’t want others (mainly strangers) to get access to. If we look at where data is held, we’d end up not using technology at all. Nowadays, we keep data on our home personal computer, on our mobile phone, in our laptops – but are we sure that all these are secure?

Users Vs Hackers: Tips and Tricks

Everyone who uses the Internet has, at some point, heard about hacking – whether purely for information or as an unfortunate victim. The word hacking has been on every Internet-user’s mind for years, but not everyone knows what hacking is and more importantly, how to fight it.

For starters, hacking has many definitions, but the prevailing one would be that hacking is the ‘art’ of bypassing all security mechanisms to gain unauthorised access into an information system (which stretches from our normal PC to high-tech servers). As everything else, not all forms of hacking is wrong because even such thing can be used for a beneficial cause. Nowadays, we can also find professional hackers who are at the service of the authorities to help them in their quest to make the Internet a safer place.