SECURITY DO’S AND DON’TS

Is your hard disk about to crash?

A friend of a friend called. He was clearly in distress. He downloaded what he said was a highly regarded hard disk analyzer and it said his disk was about to crash. Should he back everything up, buy a new hard disk and reinstall everything?

I asked him which OS he ran – XP Pro. Same as me. So I downloaded the program and asked it to analyze my C disk. The program is called Hard Disk Inspector. I had never heard of it. After installation I asked it to analyze and monitor my disks. Then I looked at its report.

The first screen was reassuring.

Then I looked at what Hard Disk Inspector so cleverly called S.M.A.R.T. details. Gulp. Not so encouraging.

Notice the five yellow circles on the left. All these indicate deficient hard disk functions. I clicked Raw Read Error Rate – but I won’t show the screen shot here, as there is too much ground to cover. Didn’t look good.

Finally, I clicked on Prognosis. Hard Disk Inspector said I was a dead duck.

My gosh, within days my hard disk would be unreliable. It would crash within a couple of weeks. April 25 was the estimated crash date. HDI even estimated the time.

It so happens that Windows XP has its own hard disk analyzer. There is no need to download third party programs. Using it is simple.

First, open ‘MyComputer’. Right click on the disk you wish to analyze.

Click Properties, then the Tools tab on the subsequent form. The top of three choices is error checking. Click Check Now.

Check both disk options, then Start.

You’ll get the following message. Click Yes to have your disk checked and fixed the next time you restart.

To end the story quickly, I later restarted the machine. While still in console mode, the disk was inspected and found to be in perfect shape, with no bad sectors.

Epilogue: I called an acquaintance who fixes computers for a living. I started telling him what I wrote above, but as soon as I mentioned Hard Disk Inspector, Larry laughed. “You’re headed for a crash, right?”

Larry told me the HDI has been around since Windows 95, and works on the DOS underpinning of that version of Windows. There is no DOS underpinning of subsequent versions of Windows. There is a ‘console’ mode, which looks like DOS to most users, but isn’t. This isn’t the place to explain the difference.

The moral of the story: Know what you are running. In XP, Windows has many utilities tuned for the operating system. You can find them by clicking Start, hovering your mouse over ‘All Programs’, then navigating to Accessories -> System Tools, you can find them.

Hardware Security

You just got off one plane and are waiting for another in an airport connection terminal. So you decide to get some work done, and pull out your laptop or PDA.

That keeps you busy. There’s a problem: The waiting lounge is full of similarly bored people – and chances are that among the thousands who will glance at you while you work, at least a few have ‘sticky fingers,’ and will desire – or actually attempt – to separate you from you property.

Theft has become a major problem for small digital devices. PDAs, laptops, and MP3 players are all popular – among both users and thieves – because of their portability.

You could be cornered in an airport bathroom and relieved of your property by a thug. More likely, you could be the victim of an experienced pickpocket.

New York’s deputy commissioner said in an interview with the New York Times last week that “iPods are definitely part of the newest items to be stolen and appear to be driving the recent spike in subway robberies.”

More than 1,000 laptops are stolen every day in the United States, close to one a minute. Protecting your device means employing ‘safe’ procedures when handling it, like keeping an MP3 player in your front pocket instead of on an armband when you’re in a crowd.

Common sense can help in some situations, but if a thief has his or her eye on your laptop or other device s/he will go to considerable lengths to get it.

There are several types of protection to employ.

You need to consider physical security to prevent or discourage robbery, such as locks or more advanced devices; passwords to protect your data, and antivirus and spyware catchers – not just for laptops, but even for PDAs.

Here I’ll just discuss physical security. For our hardware, as for us, it’s a basic part of living. Ensuring that your devices are too difficult or risky for a thief to bother with is a useful strategy.

As all of you with a laptop know, manufacturers include a slot for a lock that can be attached to the back of the device. You attach a steel cable lock – like a bicycle lock – to the slot and around the front, preventing the top of the device from being opened – and severely damaging it if it is.

But as we’ve all read, thieves have tools that can quickly cut most such cables.

However, products like the Targus DEFCON KL Notebook Computer Key Lock feature a six-foot steel cable with a pass-through loop on one end and a lock on the other. You have a choice of a key lock or a combination lock.

You can see this product and a variety of others at Targus’ website .

Kensington, for example, claims that its ComboSaver Security Cable is made of “aircraft-grade galvanized steel” and its “Kevlar brand fiber in the cable is virtually impossible to cut through.”

You can buy these devices almost anywhere and certainly over the Internet.

Kensington also offers the Sonic Lock, a device that attaches with a lock to the security slot and is attached to a motion alarm that will make a loud annoying sound if it is moved by an unauthorized individual.

Another innovative system is the Targus Defcon Motion Data Protection Anti-Theft PC Card. This is a Type ll PC card that goes into your laptop’s slot and features a motion-sensor that secures data, prohibits unapproved access and sounds a 110 dB alarm if tampered with.

Before you invest in a security lock, be aware they are not foolproof. There are a number of web sites that will show you how to wrap cardboard around a pen or plastic tube to act as a probe that will check the combinations in a lock or the tumblers in a key-based lock.

A few sites show a two minute video of how it’s done. For example, EvilMerc.

Is there any way of protecting your laptop, other than packing a weapon? You can try the biometric route. Biometrics is a hardware and software solution enabling authentication of a user by fingerprints which are stored on their smartcards. APC sells a USB-based biometric fingerprint reader that costs well under $100. The device is half the size of a conventional mouse, so it can be easily carried along in a laptop case.

OnClick’s FreedomPass Mouse FM-8622 combines an optical mouse and a fingerprint reader.

Microsoft makes a biometric reader, and it is highly rated by users. And manufacturers of new notebooks are including built-in options for fingerprint readers: IBM’s Thinkpad T42 now features a biometric reader.

Will biometric readers, along with a lock make a theft unlikely? Yes. But not even fingerprint readers are infallible, as I’ll discuss in a future column.

Dennis Turner