TOPS

Just as I sat down to put together an entry on computer security, I received an email from a friend about “…the worst virus announced by CNN. It has been classified by Microsoft as the most destructive virus ever.”

This forwarded email message (which I know my friend had sent to all her friends because I could see all their names and email addresses) went on to describe the threat in detail, referencing all the big names: Symantec, McAfee, Snopes, etc., and warning me of the potential for complete destruction of my hard drive and all the information stored on it. The only protection offered in the case of receiving this virus was to shut down the computer immediately.

After looking over the message, I decided to write about something other than security…I decided to write about logic and common sense. No doubt you’ve heard stories about home owners who were so frightened of being robbed that they put multiple locks on their doors and bars on their windows, then were unable to exit their homes when they experienced a fire.

Computer security requires a lot of common sense. Although the warning email I received claimed to have checked out the threat on the popular “myth busting” site Snopes.com, I went to Snopes myself and immediately was reading: “Although the Postcard virus is real, it isn’t a BIG VIRUS COMING (it’s already been around in multiple forms for a long time now), it will not burn the whole hard disk of your computer, CNN didn’t classify it as the worst virus ever…“

In other words, if you are going to be vigilant and skeptical, then be skeptical of all the warnings you receive. It’s true there are some really bad people out there. They will steal your personal information, they will gleefully send you a virus that will create havoc on your computer, they will send you hundreds of emails offering cheap drugs and male enhancement products.

You should definitely take prudent steps to protect yourself from all of the above, but six dead-bolt locks on each door and locked bars on the windows might be overkill and won’t work when someone knocks on the door, offers to fix the roof damage they conveniently noticed as they passed by and then makes off with a check for several hundred dollars and your checking account and social security numbers printed on the front.

There is a correlation to the old saying ”if it’s too good to be true, it probably isn’t.“ Basically, you just shouldn’t trust any extreme message, whether it says you can earn $5 million overnight or a virus is coming that will destroy your computer.

In an effort to be helpful, this dire email warning my friend sent me had two links claiming to be to the articles that verified the validity of the claims. I didn’t trust the almost hysterical tone of the email, and I didn’t trust the links included. I went to Firefox and typed in the address www.snopes.com. to assess the warning.

Later, I checked out the links and they proved to be legitimate, but the point is they might have been links to the virus itself!

Logic and common sense, two of the best security tools you can own.

It often seems as if the computer issues my customers come up with occur in clusters. A month or so ago, I had two customers hit by lightening. Here in Indiana, that’s not all that uncommon, especially in spring.

Lately, though, I’ve had a lot of calls about various problems with hard drives, so I thought I’d write a little bit about hard drive technology and some of the hard facts of hard drives.

WARNING: I’m going to explain hard drives for the novice, not for techies, so if you’re a purist, stop reading here!

To understand a hard drive, think of a record player. Inside the metal case of a hard drive, you have a metal disk (that’s the record) and a mechanical arm with a reading device called a head (that’s the needle and needle arm). Your information is written onto the metal disk and then read back to you using the arm/head. Again, this is a vast oversimplification, but the principles are basically the same.

My generation grew up with record players and turntables and will instantly understand the problems with hard drives: 1) they are mechanical and 2) that head needs to access the disk in precise and controlled positioning.

Staying with the record player analogy, remember what happened when you left your favorite 78 of Beach Blanket Bingo laying in the sun? Or what happened when your kid brother came in and started horsing around while you had your portable record player balanced on the arm of your chair? Remember how the diamond needles wore down or were broken when the arm dropped and bounced around, banging the needle on some part of the player?

All of those problems can be recreated on hard drives. Drop the hard drive or the computer where it lives and you will damage the head or the disk or the mechanical arm or all three.

Most desktop computers come home from the store, are placed on the floor or the desk, set up and never or seldom moved again in their life. Laptops, however, are increasing in popularity and because of their very nature (they are portable computers, after all) are moved around often. The potential for disaster is ongoing.

Hard drive technology has improved to match the growing use of laptops. There is a device on many computers called a sudden acceleration sensor which literally senses when the computer is … well, suddenly accelerating, as in falling. This sensor triggers “parking” of the heads in a safe place and not in contact with the disk, which will hopefully avoid the results when sudden acceleration suddenly ceases, a condition known as landing.

This is a great feature, but in my experience (and the experience of one of my customers) does not protect a hard drive in a laptop that is deliberately slammed against a dresser. It also has not protected another customer laptop from a 3 foot fall to the floor.

Calls from customers who tell me they only want the photos of their kids off the hard drives that are dead as a brick make me sick to my stomach, but when your hard drive fails, it’s usually too late to remember what precious data you have on them.

This is so boring for me to say, and I know you won’t listen, but here we go anyway: if you have photos of your kids, poems your grandma wrote, email from your late Uncle Joe, make sure they are stored in more than one place. Don’t trust the hard drive in your 5 year old computer to always be available to you. It won’t.