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Achieving best security with your backup solution
One of the top priorities in any organization is to secure
and protect its data. Today the majority of all information is stored on computers
and increasing amount of data is exchanged over the Internet. It is imperative
to prevent "eavesdropping" while this data is in transit, as well as to protect
confidential information stored on network computers, servers, workstations
and CD/DVD media. Thus, computer security becomes vital, and the essential
element of security is data encryption.
Many encryption algorithms use password as an encryption key. Password is
a secret word or phrase. It is used to encrypt your data. You should remember
it and provide one when you want to decrypt the data.
An ideal password should be rather complicated to ensure security and at the
same time it should be simple enough for easy remembering. Here are some tips
on how to choose a good password. Do not use your name or your relative’s
name as a secret password. Examples of insecure passwords are also: your car
number, phone number or your home address. Besides, avoid passwords that consist
of letters or digits only: it’s better to use combination of letters and digits.
Note that there are computer programs – password crackers that would quickly
decrypt such code. At the very least, do not use dictionary words, even foreign
ones, as this is an easy way for such programs to force the lock. Most of
password crackers are also able to determine whether a dictionary word is
written back to front or written with capital letters.
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what password would be safe enough? Usually it is a password with the length
of 6-8 symbols, consisting both of capital and small letters, and also digits
and punctuation symbols. Would it be easy to crack such password? For a computer
that is able to perform a million operations per second, it would take more
than a hundred years. A password consisting of 4 symbols – a capital letter,
a small letter, a digit and some punctuation symbol – is 6,8 times safer than
a password that consists of 7 symbols that are only digits (68 574 961 and
10 000 000 possible combinations correspondingly). For example, the password
“No7?” is more preferable than the password “3450236”. A password containing
9 various symbols (capital and small letters, digits and punctuation symbols)
will already have 430 quadrillion variants of possible combinations.
And what password would be easy to remember? Some people suggest taking the
title of your favorite book or film, or a line from a song or a poem, select
the first letters of each word, add capital letters, digits or punctuation
symbols and finally form your password. Another variant is to make up some
abracadabra word, which is easy to remember. You can also take 2 short words
and put some punctuation symbol between them, for example “My?Cat”. However,
sometimes it is impossible to use punctuation symbols or capital letters in
passwords – it depends on the program that you use to encrypt your files.
But nevertheless, the tips above will help you to protect your confidential
data. Do not forget to change your passwords regularly – this is also important.
The next important thing after you have chosen a password is to choose the
right software. Each software program that provides data encryption is based
on some encryption algorithm (such algorithms are also known as “ciphers”).
Here are the examples of ciphers: Blowfish, Gost, Rc4, Des, Skipjack, Twofish,
Tea, Xor. Blowfish was designed in 1993 by Bruce Schneier and became a fast
and free alternative to existing encryption algorithms: DES (Data Encryption
Standard), CAST, IDEA. Blowfish is ideal for both domestic and exportable
use. Since 1993, it has been thoroughly analyzed and gained acceptance as
a strong 128-bit encryption algorithm.
Some backup programs can encrypt and decrypt ZIP files only. Others perform
encryption and decryption of any type of files. Standard ZIP password protection
is one of the easiest and fastest encryption methods, which enables to compress
and encrypt your data at the same time. When creating password-protected ZIP
archives, you will be able to extract your files on any computer using any
ZIP client. However, such protection is rather weak in comparison with Blowfish
encryption and some other strong algorithms. If you use these methods, you
will get the enhanced security of backed up files. However, in this case your
files may be stored in some specific format depending on the program that
encrypted them. And to restore such files, you will need to use the program
that performed the encryption. When choosing a method of data protection,
you should also take into account that strong encryption and further decryption
of a large amount of data requires significant CPU time.
Your choice of more or less strong encryption method would also depend on
the location where you will store your files. For example, if you save a backup
copy to a local drive or your company’s local area network, possibly it is
not necessary to use strong encryption algorithm. In case you back up your
data to a remote FTP server, you should take into account that FTP protocol
is not secure by itself. Even private FTP account does not ensure the security
of your files; it only protects the access to FTP server. Anyone who specifies
your account credentials will gain access to your data. So if you store your
files on a remote server, it is strongly recommended to protect them using
some encryption algorithm. In this case, you may want to choose one of the
strongest encryption methods.
So your choice of data protection method
would depend on many parameters:
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The level of security you want to achieve; |
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Destination of your data storage: on a remote
Internet server, CD/DVD media or local drive; |
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The amount of data you want to encrypt and how
much time you are ready to spend for encryption/decryption processes; |
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Whether you need a compatibility of encrypted
files with other programs or not. |
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07.08.05
Backup Platinum successfully passed
the "Designed for Windows XP" certification
by Microsoft®
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Can run in service mode
on Windows 2000/
