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Archive for the ‘Data Recovery’ Category

What Professionals Use to Recover Microsoft Office Passwords
The Microsoft Office Application Suite has dominated the market for many years. The suite offers a complete set of tools for the most demanding computer users, but there is one essential tool missing.
Microsoft Office documents can be protected against unauthorized access and saved with a password. While these documents are surely protected against unauthorized use, what about accessing them legitimately when one forgets or loses the password? This is not a hypothetical question, as many people forget passwords they used just a week ago, let alone a year ago. Even more often, a new employee trying to open Office documents finds out that the passwords are not available.
The one essential tool that is missing from the Microsoft Office suite is a password recovery tool. Microsoft might have had legitimate reasons not to provide such tools, but the problem screams for a solution. Lost passwords can mean just a headache for absent-minded individuals, but can cause serious financial trouble for many organizations.
The demand is there, and the supply has followed. There is no lack of password recovery services and third-party software tools to handle password-protected documents. There are certain pros and cons to both approaches.
Password recovery services can do a great job, providing fast recovery of your lost passwords. But are they worth the price they charge, if you are a home user trying to unlock your year-old CV? And can you trust your corporate documentation to even reputable third parties? If the answer is negative, you are a potential user of dedicated software tools that work off-line on your own computer.
Such software can take longer to recover your passwords, but you won’t pay outrageous prices and you don’t share your trade secrets with a third party. And personal software is really not that slow! Chances are that your password can be recovered in an instant. You’ll be using the same software used by password recovery professionals but on your own computer.

What You Can Use to Recover Microsoft Office Passwords like a Professional
Meet Accent OFFICE Password Recovery (http://passwordrecoverytools.com/), a tool that’s used by password recovery specialists. More importantly, it’s the tool that can recover your password and do it fast:no matter how complex your password was.
Accent OFFICE Password Recovery can easily access many documents. To make a long story short, not all Microsoft Office documents are equally well-protected. Certain versions and certain types of passwords can be broken instantly without the need of long password-crunching routines. How can you tell if your documents fall into this category? Download a free copy of Accent OFFICE Password Recovery from http://passwordrecoverytools.com/ to see if your password can be instantly removed.
What if your document was encrypted with a strong password and cannot be recovered instantly? If so, Accent OFFICE Password Recovery will try different passwords until it finds one that fits. Modern computers are fast, so fast that hundreds of thousands of different passwords can be tried every second. Your typical “123″ password will be cracked in no time! Read the rest of this entry »

RAID server failure is one of the dreaded work hazards you may have to face sometimes at your workplace. You tend to become incapable and powerless when you are unable to access data with a click.
Data on a RAID array or volume can becomes inaccessible due to any of the following reasons:
• A faulty RAID controller
• Multiple hard drive crash
• Malfunctioning upgrade or faulty striping
• Defects with the MFT mount points.
• RAID controller failure or configuration changed
• Adding incompatible hard drives
• Hardware conflicts
• Software corruption
• Virus infection, software and operating system upgrades
In these above conditions, the following steps should be taken immediately to increase chances of getting critical files back:
• Shutdown the server and turn off the system. Do not try to reboot again. This may cause serious damage to your hard drive.
• Do not attempt to recover data by yourself, friends or PC repair shops. This may result in permanent loss.
• Do not continue to attempt a forced rebuild if you have already replaced a failed drive and tried to rebuild the array, but still can’t access your data. This may wipe out your data. RAID data recovery utilities and software are not designed to restore data or rebuild RAID arrays from failing hard drives. This requires specialized equipment and professional training.
• Swapping hard drives or re-ordering drives in a multiple drive RAID array may cause overwriting the striping and parity. This makes it nearly difficult to reconstruct your RAID array and salvage your company’s vital data. Read the rest of this entry »

Definition Of A Survivable Computer System
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A computer system, which may be made up of multiple individual systems and components, designed to provide mission critical services must be able to perform in a consistent and timely manner under various operating conditions. It must be able to meet its goals and objectives whether it is in a state of normal operation or under some sort of stress or in a hostile environment. A discussion on survivable computer systems can be a very complex and far reaching one. However, in this article we will touch on just a few of the basics.

Computer Security And Survivable Computer Systems
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Survivable computer systems and computer security are in many ways related but at a low-level very much different. For instance, the hardening of a particular system to be resistant against intelligent attacks may be a component of a survivable computer system. It does not address the ability of a computer system to fulfill its purpose when it is impacted by an event such as a deliberate attack, natural disaster or accident, or general failure. A survivable computer system must be able to adapt, perform its primary critical functions even if in a hostile environment, even if various components of the computer system are incapacitated. In some cases, even if the entire “primary” system has been destroyed.

As an example; a system designed to provide real-time critical information regarding analysis of specialized medications ceases to function for a few hours because of wide spread loss of communication. However, it maintains the validity of the data when communication is restored and systems come back online. This computer system could be considered to have survived under conditions outside of its control.

On the other hand, the same system fails to provide continuous access to information under normal circumstances or operating environment, because of a localized failure, may not be judged to have fulfilled its purpose or met its objective.

Fault Tolerant And Highly Availability Computer Systems
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Many computer systems are designed with fault tolerant components so they continue to operate when key portions of the system fail. For instance; multiple power supplies, redundant disk drives or arrays, even multiple processors and system boards that can continue to function even if its peer component is destroyed or fails. The probability of all components designed to be redundant failing at one time may be quite low. However, a malicious entity that knows how the redundant components are configured may be able to engineer critical failures across the board rendering the fault tolerant components ineffective.

High availability also plays a role in a survivable computer system. However this design component may not maintain computer system survivability during certain events such as various forms of malicious attack . An example of this might be a critical web service that has been duplicated, say across multiple machines, to allow continuous functionality if one or more the individual web servers was to fail. The problem is that many implementations of high availability use the same components and methodology on all of the individual systems. If an intelligent attack or malicious event takes place and is directed at a specific set of vulnerabilities on one of the individual systems, it is reasonable to assume the remaining computer systems that participate in the highly available implementation are also susceptible to the same or similar vulnerabilities. A certain degree of variance must be achieved in how all systems participate in the highly available implementation.

What’s The Difference Between An Attack, Failure, And Accident?
How Do These Differences Impact A Survivable Computer System
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In many cases when I am discussing the security of systems with customers, the question of business continuity and disaster recovery come up. Most companies that provide a service that they deem critical just know the system needs to be operational in a consistent manner. However, there is typically little discussion about the various events or scenarios surrounding this and that can lead to great disappointment in the future when what the customer thought was a “survivable computer system” does not meet their expectations. Some of the items I like to bring up during these conversations is what their computer systems goal and objective is, what specifically does continuous operation mean to them, and specifically what constitutes an attack, failure, or accident that can cause loss of operation or failure to meet objectives.
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How does Virtual Private Network service work in banking?
Whenever you use the internet through an Internet Service Provider (ISP) or at another site, your computer is given an address on that provider’s network. While you can reach your bank from the Internet, you will normally be denied access to services that are restricted to bank network addresses because your computer is using an address from an external network.

But, if you are on the internet, you can still connect to the Bank’s VPN service, in two ways. From a web browser or with a software VPN client. A VPN need not have explicit security features, such as authentication or content encryption. Virtual Private Network setup, can be used to separate traffic of different user communities over an underlying network with strong security features.

Seek secured private connectivity across public IP networks!

Extends geographical connectivity
Improves productivity
Improves security
Reduce transit time and transportation costs for remote users
Reduce operational costs versus traditional WAN
Simplify network topology
Provides global networking opportunities
Provides broadband networking compatibility
Provides faster ROI than traditional WAN
Provides telecommuter support

VPN are categorised into two types:
• Remote access VPN
• Site to site VPN

What is site to site Virtual Private Network in banking?
Such Site to site VPN allows you to have a secured connection between locations across the open internet. With the help if site to site VPN your bank can save a great deal of money, as you can use cheaper means always – on connections such as domestic broadband rather than expensive leased lines between sites.
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