Exercise 15: Protecting and archiving data

1. What makes a firewall a good security investment? Accessing the Internet, find two or three firewall vendors. Do they provide hardware, software or both?

Elias (2003) described that firewall acts as a sheild to prevent data and information inside the network to the public. Firewall is a hardware and software tool defines control and access of network and computers.

Firewall vendors:
Check Point Firewall
It is a security vendor, it sells hardware appliance and software firewall.

Kerio Technologies
It is a security vendor, it sells software firewall only.

Comodo
It is a security vendor, it sells software firewall and integrated security solutions.

2. Find out if your university or workplace has a backup policy in place. Is it followed and enforced?

In my workplace, there is a backup policy for the main servers. It is a enforced policy. In the policy, all files and data are backup daily to the backup server. As the backup server uses hard drives to store data, RAID-5 system is used and the backup server is located away from the main servers.

A tape backup system is also implemented to some of the servers. It backup data in a full backup manner. The tapes are rotated and changed every two weeks and the tape with the data is stored away from the server and tape backup system.


3. Most of the antivirus software perform an active scanning of the user activity on the Internet, detecting downloads and attachments in e-mails. Hackers have readily available resources to create new viruses. How easy is it to find a virus writing kit? Search the Internet and find such a tool. For example, see what you can find at http://vx.netlux.org/dat/vct.shtml.

In the http://vx.netlux.org, the virus can be easily generated with the generator.
Each of them generate different kind of virus.

As I searched with keyword "create computer virus", I found a blog from Bendib (Nov 22, 2008. 6:35 PM) posted a virus source code in his blog.

As I search again in Google with keyword "computer virus generator", one of the computer security website shows the name of the generator. I then search again with the name listed in the security website. It is easy to find the generator with the search engines.