Skip to main content

Environmental Threats- Computer Security


Introduction

To gain high secure, a system must be concerned about the interference of natural matters too. The natural matters which affect the security of a computer system are called as ‘Environmental Threats’. Some of the examples for environmental threats can be categorized as extreme cold,heat,humidity,dust,rainfalls,earthquakes, floods, fires, hurricanes, snow, ice, mud slides and sink holes.

Methods of mitigating Environmental Threats

· Air filters should remove fine dust particles because outdoor dust is brought in on clothes and shoes

· Air filters must be cleaned or replaced in a regular schedule.

· Periodically air heating equipment should be turned on, even it isn’t needed. This is to incrementally burn off that would other wise accumulate and be converted to an appreciable amount of smoke, when the equipment is activated for the first time after a long time period.

· Water detectors should be placed above and below a raised floor to monitor the rise of water level.

· An automatic power shutdown should be triggered by a sensor that is lower than the lowest energized wire.

· Any equipment that produces strong magnetic fields should be kept in a room separate from any media that is not scheduled to erase.

· Computers should be kept away from sources of vibrations, including printers. If this can’t be arranged, vibration absorbing mats can be placed under the computer or offending device.

· A dependable and redundant system of air conditionings and humidity controls need to be implemented, monitored continuously and issued alerts when problems occurred.

· If possible the use of a humidifier and dehumidifier should be used to keep a proper humidity levels as climate area and air conditioners can affect greatly the proper levels of humidity in this controlled environment.

· Routers and switches should be placed in an equipment rack with the proper spacing between devices to allow for proper airflow. Typically you will want to allow one “rack unit” or RU between the equipment within the rack.

· Automatic fire detectors should be placed on the ceilings of the rooms as well as hidden spaces (Eg.below raised floors and above suspended ceilings).These fire detectors must be able to function during a power outage.

· An alarm triggering a HI or LOW temperature parameter should be sent to a remote monitoring facility, emailed, text messaged, or paged to the proper personnel.

· As a backup plan, fans should be stored nearby for use in an emergency, as they could mean the difference between keeping equipment online and functioning and being destroyed by the heat if a failure was to occur.

· Long term preservation of data should be stored in magnetic or optical format to keep those data in perpetuity.

· The important and necessary data of the system should be kept as backups in magnetic or optical format to keep for a long time.

References

  1. The paper 'The Changing Face of Network Security Threats'
  2. The book 'Internet Encyclopedia,Volume 03'

Comments

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

Convert an InputStream to XML

For that we can use DocumentBuilder class in java. By using the method parse(InputStream) ; A new DOM Document object will return. InputStream input; DocumentBuilderFactory factory = DocumentBuilderFactory.newInstance(); DocumentBuilder parser = factory.newDocumentBuilder(); Document dc= parser.parse(input); In the above code segment,by using the created Document object,the corresponding XML file for the inputStream can be accessed. References: http://www.w3schools.com/dom/dom_intro.asp http:// download.oracle.com/javase/1.4.2/docs/api/javax/xml/parsers/DocumentBuilder.html
2 comments
Read more

CORS support from WSO2 API Manager 2.0.0

Cross-origin resource sharing (CORS) is a mechanism that allows restricted resources  on a web page to be requested from another domain outside the domain from which the first restricted resource was served. For example, an HTML page of a web application served from http://domain-a.com makes an <img src >  request for a different domain as 'domain-b.com' to get an image via an API request.  For security reasons, browsers restrict cross-origin HTTP requests initiated from within scripts as in above example and only allows to make HTTP requests to its own domain. To avoid this limitation modern browsers have been used CORS standard to allow cross domain requests. Modern browsers use CORS in an API container - such as  XMLHttpRequest  or Fetch - to mitigate risks of cross-origin HTTP requests.Thing to  note is it's not only sufficient that the browsers handle client side of cross-origin sharing,but also the servers from which these resources getting need to handl
Post a Comment
Read more

[WSO2 AM] APIStore User Signup as an approval process

In previous versions of WSO2 APIManager before 1.6.0, it was allowed any user who's accessible the running APIStore come and register to the app.But there will be requirement like,without allowing any user to signup by him/her self alone,first get an approve by a privileged user and then allow to complete app registration.Same requirement can be apply to application creation and subscription creation as well.To fulfill that,we have introduced workflow extension support for  WSO2 APIManager  and you can find the introductory post on this feature from my previous blog post on " workflow-extentions-with-wso2-am-160 " . From this blog-post,I'll explain how to achieve simple workflow integration with default shipped resources with  WSO2 APIManager 1.6.0 and WSO2 Business Process Server 3.1.0 with targeting "user-signup" process. Steps First download the WSO2 APIManager 1.6.0[AM] binary pack from product download page . Extract it and navigate to
Post a Comment
Read more