Data loss might also occur in small drives such as the Hitachi MicroDrive. Ontrack was unable to recover any data in the above right example.
Damage to a drive’s circuit board or defects of the drive heads occur fairly often. In both cases, to access hard drive data, a data recovery specialist will substitute the defective component with a working one. In the best case scenario you regain 100% of your data.
A so called head crash – where a write/read head physically hits the magnetic platter – is much more severe. Simply hitting your drive might cause…
What if your hard drive decides to enter the Elysian Fields in this very moment? Sure, you could simply get a new hard drive to substitute for the defective one with a quick run to your favorite hardware store. And with last night’s backup you might even reconstruct your installation quickly. But what if you don’t have a backup? The truth to be more like this: many users don’t even have a backup, or it simply is too old and thus useless for recovering any useful files at all. In case of real hard drive damage, only a professional data…
2. Sasser
Shaun Nichols: Just how much damage can a virus do? Well, take the Sasser worm as one example. This relatively simple little attack managed to cripple airlines, news agencies and even knocked out government systems.
Perhaps most frustrating, however, was that Sasser infection was very easy to prevent. The vulnerability which the attack exploited had been patched for months, and all users had to do was install the most recent security updates from Microsoft.
Sasser was a stark warning that has yet to be heard by many. Unpatched systems are still pervasive around the world, leaving…
4. Nimda
Iain Thomson: A week after the 11 September atrocities a new virus hit the internet in a big way. Nimda was one of the fastest propagating viruses in history, going from nowhere to become the most common virus online in 22 minutes, according to some reports.
The reason for this speed was that Nimda used every trick in the book to spread itself. It used email, open network shares, IIS vulnerabilities and even web sites to spread. It hit pretty much every version of Windows available and appeared all over the place.
In the paranoid days after…
6. Storm
Shaun Nichols: Before Conficker came around and got everyone worked into a lather, Storm was the big bad botnet on the block. First appearing in early 2007 as a fake news video on European flooding, the Storm malware menaced users for more than a year.
The huge botnet was also influential for its continued use of social engineering tactics. The malware disguised itself as everything from video files to greeting cards, and attacks were continuously refreshed to coincide with holidays and current news events.
While Storm has since been eclipsed by newer botnets, the name still brings…
8. Conficker
Shaun Nichols: The global catastrophe that wasn’t, the third form of the Conficker attack provided nice theatrics but little in the way of actual damage.
The premise was pretty simple: Conficker.C would spread to as many machines as possible throughout March. Each infected machine was given a huge list of domains, one of which would be contacted by 1 April.
The deadline made all the difference. Now, Conficker wasn’t just a simple malware infection, it was a ‘ticking time bomb’, and a looming menace that would unleash carnage. Or at least that’s what the story turned into…
10. Elk Cloner
Iain Thomson: Elk Cloner was written by a 15-year old high school student called Rich Skrenta as a practical joke. Unfortunately for him the joke turned bad very quickly.
The virus was developed for the Apple II system and was a boot sector virus that spread via floppy discs. Apparently Skrenta was a fan of pirated games and would swap them with his friends, sometimes with little messages added. After one too many of these infected discs, he devised a way to alter discs automatically and the Elk Cloner virus was invented.
It had little in…
All this panic over a simple strain of flu got us thinking about some of the more virulent computer pandemics that have hit in recent years. While a computer virus pales in seriousness to a human outbreak, malware attacks can still take a huge toll on businesses throughout the world.
The viruses below may not have been the most widespread or effective, although many of them were. Instead they are the ones that stick in the mind as being particularly notable. There are been so many over the years, and viruses will always be a part of computing now, but…
IBM has announced new solid state drive (SSD) products, designed to help firms reduce costs and improve memory response times across its Power hardware platforms.
The firm said that, based on its own testing, it expected to see huge performance boosts in user systems, while the drives would also have a dramatic impact on the physical footprint of storage facilities.
Advertisement”The new offerings can improve performance by up to 800 per cent, while also reducing the physical footprint of the amount of storage needed by approximately 80 per cent, and energy consumption by up to 90 per cent,” IBM said…
You’ll often see news stories that say such and such a manufacturer has launched the “. But how can they all be true?
Sad to relate – but often they are not. Other storage publications – which only have a superficial grasp of this market – publish many claims which are completely wrong because they aren’t aware of the hundreds of other SSD products already available in the market.
Another problem is that many magazine and vendor published SSD benchmarks are unreliable due to halo effects.
If SSD speed is your thing – you’ve come to the…
