Key points to avoid computer disaster
Jan 8 2008 by Sue Scott, Evening Gazette
A FRIGHTENING 43% of all businesses who suffer a major loss of computerised records never reopen and only 6% survive long term.
While the Department for Work and Pensions and the Inland Revenue will probably survive the embarrassment, for Teesside businesses collapse is a very real threat, according to Stokesley digital forensics expert Jonathan Wheatley.
“Good housekeeping is where it starts,” he says. “Are your computers secure and protected? How secure are your passwords? How often are they changed? How often have staff left and yet they are still on the system as a user? Do you even have a security policy? These are some of the questions you should be asking.”
As a minimum, firms should be in the habit of downloading data and storing it off site once a week.
“If they are predominantly data-base led, a lot of companies take back-up religiously each night but they never back-up off site... and the fire gets everything. Once a week at the very least you need to take a tape home with you,” said Mr Wheatley, managing director of IT firm MC Ware and HD Forensics, a highly specialised consultancy which provides expert witnesses in child pornography and mobile phone fraud cases.
Internet-based back-up is not always the answer for private firms, he warns.
“In our experience, unless you are prepared to test and restore once a week and try to recover a file from that system, it’s not worth it. We saw this with one company which had backed up for two years or so. They thought they were safe, but when we went in to retrieve it, we found an empty file. Fortunately, by using forensic techniques we were able to restore it.”
He urged companies handling sensitive data to use readily available encryption programmes to protect them from legal action.
“It’s such an easy thing to do - even Word comes with its own form of compression and encryption, but it doesn’t happen as much as it should do.
“The Inland Revenue case was crazy. It was a schoolboy error. You should never have the security permission to even get access to that information.
“It really worries me about a national database. The public cannot have any trust or faith. National identity cards must be totally dead in the water, although the technology is there to make it safe.”
