Pentagon: Computers Attacked With Flash Drive!!

A foreign spy agency pulled off the most serious breach of Pentagon computer networks ever by inserting a flash drive into a US military laptop, a top defense official said Wednesday. The previously classified incident, which took place in 2008 in the Middle East, was disclosed in a magazine article by Deputy Defense Secretary William J Lynn and released by the Pentagon Wednesday. He said a "malicious code" on the flash drive spread undetected on both classified and unclassified Pentagon systems, "establishing what amounted to a digital beachhead, from which data could be transferred to servers under foreign control." "It was a network administrator's worst fear: a rogue program operating silently, poised to deliver operational plans into the hands of an unknown adversary," Lynn wrote in an article for Foreign Affairs. "This ... was the most significant breach of US military computers ever and it served as an important wake-up call." The Pentagon operation to counter the attack, known as Operation Buckshot Yankee, marked a turning point in US cyberdefense strategy, Lynn said. 

In November 2008, the Defense Department banned the use of the small high-tech storage devices that are used to move data from one computer to another. The ban was partially lifted early this year with the approval of limited use of the devices. Lynn did not disclose what, if any, military secrets may have been stolen in the 2008 penetration of the system, what nation orchestrated the attack, nor whether there were any other repercussions. The article went on to warn that US adversaries can threaten American military might without building stealth fighters, aircraft carriers or other expensive weapons systems. "A dozen determined computer programmers can, if they find a vulnerability to exploit, threaten the United States' global logistics network, steal its operational plans, blind its intelligence capabilities, or hinder its ability to deliver weapons on target," Lynn wrote.

"Knowing this, many militaries are developing offensive capabilities in cyberspace, and more than 100 foreign intelligence organizations are trying to break into US networks," he said.

Defense officials have said repeatedly that the military system of some 15,000 computer networks and seven million computers suffers millions of probes a day with threats coming from a range of attackers from routine hackers to foreign governments looking to steal sensitive information or bring down critical, life-sustaining systems.

Do I need to back up my computer?

Even if you've taken precautions to protect your computer from malicious software, other potential dangers could destroy the information it holds. A power surge, lightning strike, hardware failure, or natural disaster could leave you without your important data or the use of your computer.

Backing up your files can help you avert disaster. Backing up is simply making an electronic copy of files and storing that copy in a safe place. If you back up your files regularly, you can retrieve some, if not all, of your information if something happens to the originals on your computer.

Here are some tips for backing up your computer:

* Use an external hard disk, CDs, DVDs, or other storage medium for your backup copies. Or upload data to an Internet-based file storage service. Whatever you do, don't just copy files to another location on your hard disk.

* Label the medium with the date and time of the backup. Don't erase the previous backup until you have made a new one.

* Back up anything you can't replace easily such as financial information, digital photos, music or programs you bought and downloaded from the Web, and school projects. For these types of files, you can simply copy and paste the file into the backup medium.

* If you use an email program that is installed on your computer (such as Microsoft Outlook), back up important email messages and your email address book. Some email programs include an export feature for backing up important data.

* If you're trying to save time or space when backing up your computer, consider backing up only your personal data. Don't copy programs like Microsoft Outlook or your operating system. They can be reinstalled from the original CDs you purchased or the System Restore CDs that came with your computer.

* If you use your computer occasionally, back up your data once a week. If you use your computer every day, a daily backup of the files you use most often or modified that day is a good idea.

* To be sure you've backed up every file, use backup software. You can find a list of backup products in the website. Your operating system may also include backup features.

* Make sure you have a copy of your operating system on a CD for re installation in case your computer's hard drive fails. If your computer shipped without a copy of the operating system, contact the manufacturer for a copy.

Are Hard Disks Going to be Obsolete in a Few Years from Now?

Are Hard Disks Going to be Obsolete in a Few Years from Now?

Hard drives have ruled the roost in the world of computers and laptops for the last few decades. They enjoy complete dominance as primary data storage devices and have now even begun to be used in such consumer electronics devices as DVD players and mobile phones.

There has been no technology until now that was able to come close to hard drives in terms of data storage capacity, reliability, functionality and cost. The commonly available hard drives have capacities of 80 GB, 120 GB and 160 GB. This is a huge amount of storage space available to a typical computer user. Hard drives are also quite cost-effective and easily affordable by anyone.

However, they have some drawbacks. The drives are based on decades-old technology and their basic design has remained more or less the same over the years. They are notorious for crashing unexpectedly, leaving the users staring at the prospects of total data loss. Also, hard drives are mechanical and have many moving parts which undergo tremendous wear and tear in the space of just a couple of years. There is an entire range of data-recovery companies which today caters exclusively to recovering data from crashed or damaged hard drives! It seems, though, that things are finally going to change in the near future.

Over the last three or four years, an entire new data storage industry of solid-state devices (SSDs) has emerged that has begun to look like a serious threat to the market dominance of the tried and trusted hard-disk technology. The flash-based drives and data storage media have steadily gained in popularity with computer users.

SSDs have always been the storage devices of choice for use in digital cameras. Commonly available flash-based memory cards come in capacities of 1 GB to 5 GB and can store thousands of high-resolution pictures. SSD storage media is also being used in mobile phones to store pictures taken from built-in cameras as well as for holding hundreds of songs that a user can listen to anytime.

SSDs have many advantages over hard disks for storing digital data. For one, they are very small, no larger than your thumb, and weigh very less. This considerably reduces the weight of digital cameras, laptops and mobile phones which a typical user has to carry with him in person.

Additionally, SSDs have no moving parts. Thus, there is no question of wear and tear or generating heat through friction. There is no maintenance cost involved with SSDs because there are no mechanical components which may go bad or need replacement over time.

Another benefit of these SSDs is that they hardly use any electricity to store or access data. There are no platters to be spun around by a spindle motor like in a hard drive and there is no elaborate circuitry that may get fried or corrupted. It is simply one single piece of solid state memory with a tough plastic coating. This energy-saving feature of SSDs is a boon for laptops which currently have to expend a large amount of battery power in operating their hard disks on which reside all data, software and operating system.

Flash-based SSDs have long been used in computers and laptops in the shape of tiny USB Flash drives for storing and transporting digital data. These drives have had a couple of drawbacks – price and capacity -- that until now prevented their large-scale use in computers as primary storage media. However, recent developments have given a major boost to the potential of flash-based drives as an alternative to hard disks.

Early this year, SanDisk corporation launched a new 32-GB solid-state drive for use in computers and laptops. It is unbelievably fast, boasting of a data-access speed that is 100 times faster than a hard drive. One can only imagine the speed at which it will allow a computer to boot up as well as load software! If this is the shape of things to come, then, indeed, it seems that the mechanical hard drives are going to be an endangered species in the next six or seven years.

The only problem with SSDs is their price, which is exorbitant compared to the storage capacity that hard drives can offer for the same amount of money. However, it is still early days. As the technology matures and scale of production increases manifold, it is only a matter of time before flash-based drives become as high capacity and inexpensive as hard drives.

When that happens, there will be a paradigm shift overnight and large-capacity flash-based drives will take the place of hard drives as the primary storage media of computers and laptops. The hard drives would then become obsolete and go the way of floppy drives – consigned to the history bin of the information technology industry.

By: James Walsh