Computer Security System for your Small Business

Computer Security

This is basically a branch of computer technology also referred to as information security as applied to computer systems and network infrastructures. The main objective behind computer security entails protecting information and property from natural disaster, corruption, or theft while at the same time allowing information and property to be accessible and productive to its legitimate users.

Most computer systems are targets for intruders because these very intruders want to access what is stored in these systems. Some of the possible target information in a computer system includes information such as bank account numbers, credit/debit cards, and social security numbers among other vital details. Whenever such kind of information is unlawfully obtained by an intruder, they can be used to make transactions illegally.

Intruders not only target money related information, they are also after computer resources such as fast internet connection, fast processing speed and huge hard disk space. These intruders have devised ways whereby they can use these particular resources to attack other systems on the network. It can be said that the more intruders use computer systems to facilitate their attacks, the more difficult it becomes for law enforcement agencies to figure out where the attack is originating from.

Intruders are very much inclined to attack home and small business computer systems because in most cases these systems are rarely secured and very easy to hack into.

Often an intruder accesses computer systems remotely by sending e-mail messages containing virus attachments that when a user unknowingly reads the email, they automatically activate the virus program hence creating a loophole which can be exploited by intruders to remotely access the computer system. In some other cases, intruders may take advantage of software vulnerabilities in order to gain access. Immediately these intruders gain access to the system and they often install spyware programs that enable them to continue using the computer system even if the original loopholes have been patched.

Securing the computer system

There are quite a number of tasks that system users need to undertake in order to ensure that their computer system is fully secured. These include:

Installing and using Antivirus programs

Antivirus applications come with the unique ability to search for the contents of each file and these softwares are programmed to look for some specific patterns that match a certain profile known as the virus signature. When the antivirus detects any file that matches this particular virus signature, the antivirus application will automatically provide several options on how to respond and this may include deleting the entire file, or just removing the offending patterns.

Ensure the system is patched

Most software vendors provide software patches which can be used to seal security loopholes in software applications. As a system user you have to periodically consult your software vendor to see if there are any available patches.

Ensure utmost care when reading e-mail attachments

Most unsolicited e-mails are usually sent to unsuspecting recipients and these mails may contain return addresses, provocative subjects, or something which encourages the recipient to open the e-mail immediately. Such a technique is known as social engineering. Social engineering is compounded by the fact that most e-mail recipients are curious and trusting to open and read their mails.

Installing firewalling programs

The firewall functions more or less like a guard on the computer network. This program comes with a unique ability to filter any unwanted traffic from the network and only allow for required traffic that is perceived to be legitimate. Other computer security techniques entail backing up important files and folders, using strong authentication mechanisms, ensuring maximum care when downloading and installing applications and integrating file encryption programs and access controls.NSK2VZ4KNRW6

Top 10 Tips-How To Protect your Computer

With Increased uses of the internet, there is a remarkable increase in online threats. It’s extremely crucial that you keep your computer safe from these threats. We are presenting 10 tips to keep your computer safe.

1. First and the foremost precautionary measure for keeping your computer safe is to invest in an antivirus program. Antivirus program will protect you from viruses and will help in avoiding any data loss or data corruption because of Virus infections. There is a new product line offered by all the Anitivirus vendors, called internet security. Internet security products protect you from antivirus, malwares and adwares.
2. Do not open suspicious email attachments. Many spam emails contain infected attachments. Make use of junk email filter and always block sender’s who send you infected emails.
3. Always install purchased software’s. Pirated software possesses threat and source files may be infected. Do not use keygens and cracks to activate pirated software’s.
4. Always scan email attachments, portable drives and CD/DVD media before copying data on your computer.
5. Do not download any suspicious files from websites, files with extensions like .scr, .vbs are executable files and are very common source of virus infection.
6. Always backup your data. This will help you to restore it in case your computer gets infected, and your data get corrupt. There are many online backup solutions available these days, which are cheap and easy to use.
7. Be aware of phishing emails. Such emails come from forged email addresses and often ask you to update your bank information or some other critical information like your email password. Information gathered using phishing emails can be exploited by the sender.
8. Use safe browsing practices. Install a pop-up blocker to disable advertisements, which lead to potentially dangerous sites. Keep your browser up to date to keep it secure, as many browsers these days release frequent updates to address the security issues. Keep your operating system updated with latest service pack and patches.

9. Do not share your personal information like phone numbers, bank details and passwords over messenger as many messengers do not encrypt the messages. The messages travel in plain text and can be hacked. Share sensitive data via email using encrypted email. There are some free encrypted email sending options available these days. Sendinc.com is one which is free and easy to use for sending encrypted emails.
10. Use a firewall on your computer and keep an eye on the traffic coming in, and going out of your computer. Block suspicious traffic. You can use hardware or software based firewalls. Windows come with an inbuilt firewall.

Tips on how to Speed up your Computer

Being a computer user, you always keep on finding ways to speed up your computers. Slow computer always results in spending more time in getting simple jobs done and results in low productivity. In many cases, the slowness is not related to computer hardware, it’s the junk and lack of organizing your stuff with the time that lead to slowness. We are presenting you 15 tips to speed up your computer.

1. Antivirus program: Always pay for an Antivirus program. If you cannot afford to go for a paid program, some of the top Antivirus Vendors like Avast and AVG provides a free Antivirus product, which is free for home usage. Viruses cause slowness and sometimes complete corruption of data on your computer. You risk everything if you do not have an antivirus program installed.

2. Unwanted Programs: Are you in a habit of downloading new programs and testing them? Every software you download and install for testing is taking up space, and in many cases it also modify the registry to run files at startup which eats your RAM. Make a habit to uninstall the programs you do not need.

3. Defragmentation: When you install a program or copy and save files on your computer the data is written to the closest available space and it results in fragmentation on your hard disk. Defragmentation process organizes the files on your hard drive and places the files together for faster access. You should defrag your computer frequently. There are many free utilities available to automate the process.

4. Disk Cleanup: If you are not a geek, Disk cleanup utility which comes free, with every version of windows can help you to cleanup junk files from your computer. You can find it under Startup Programs-> Accessories-> System tools.

5. Updates: Keep your system updates with latest patches. Keep your drivers updated. This will help you to run your computer at its optimum level. OS patches keep you safe from online threats and Virus infections. You can enable Automatic updates to update your system weekly.

6. Backup old data to External Drives: As External storage is cheap and very affordable these days, it’s always good to keep your old data on external storage and keep your computer free from unwanted or old data.

7. Upgrade Memory: Memory upgrade can give you significant boost. With Memory prices coming down, it’s always good to have more RAM in your system. More RAM helps in faster execution of programs.

8. Disable Startup Programs: To speed up the computer boot process, it’s always good to disable unwanted startup programs. You can do it by launching MSConfig utility.

9. Disable Indexing or Tweak the Indexing settings: Indexing files on your computer may result in slow performance. You should either disable Indexing or tweak settings so that indexing runs only when your computer is idle.

10. Multitasking: Depending on your computer hardware, you can run multiple programs up to a certain limit. Avoid using multiple instances of programs like Photoshop, illustrator, video editors and virus scanners at the same time.

11. Regular scanning: Schedule scanning your computer for any malware and adware programs. Malware and adware slow down your computer and sometimes result in frequent crashing of the application and computer.

12. You can use the sleep or hibernate mode to speed up the boot process.

13. Do not install unwanted Add-ons and themes

14. Do not browse potentially danger websites. Sites, which distribute pirated software’s and cracks are potentially dangerous sites and may infect your pc by exploiting vulnerabilities.

15. You can always use some tune up software’s like Advanced system care or Tune up utilities, these software’s scan your system and suggest you many tweaks, which you can apply with a single click to speed up your computer.

What is OS (Operating system)?

An operating system (often referred to as OS) is an integrated set of programs that controls the resources (the CPU, memory, I/O devices, etc) of a computer system and provides its users with an interface or virtual machine that is more convenient to use than bare machine. According to this definition, the two primary objectives of an operating system are:

1.       Makin a computer system convenient to use- An operating system is a layer of software on top of the bare hardware of a computer system, which manages all parts of the system, and presents to the user with an interface or virtual machine, which is easier to program and use. That is, the operating system hides the details of the hardware resources from the programmer and provides the programmer with a convenient interface for using the computer system. It acts as an intermediary between the hardware and its users, providing a high-level interface to low-level hardware resources, and making it easier for the programmer and other users to access and use those resources.

The logical architecture of a computer system is shown in figure………..

As shown in the figure, the hardware resources are surrounded by the operating system layer, which in turn is surrounded by a layer of other system software (such as compilers, editors, utilities, etc.)and a set of application programs(such as commercial data processing applications, scientific and engineering applications, entertainment and educational applications,etc).Finally, the end users view the computer system in term of the user interfaces provided by the application programs.

2.       Managing the resources of a computer system. The second important objective of an operating system is to manage the various resources of the computer system. This involves performing such tasks as keeping track of who is using which resource, granting resource requests, accounting for resource usage, and mediating conflicting requests from different program and users. The efficient and fair sharing of resources among users and/or program is a key goal of most operating systems.

Main Functions of an Operating System

The main functions performed by most operating systems of today are as follows:

1.       Process Management- The process management module of an operating system takes care of the creation and deletion of process, scheduling of various system resources to the different processes requesting them, and providing mechanisms for synchronization and communication among process.

2.       Memory Management- The memory management module of an operating system takes care of the allocation and deallocation of memory space to the various programs in need of these resources.

3.       File Management-The file management module of an operating system takes care of file-related activities such as organization, storing, retrieval, naming, sharing, and protection of files.

4.       Security – The security module of an operating system protects the resources and information of a computer system against destruction and unauthorized access.

5.       Command Interpretation – The command interpretation module of an operating system takes care of interpreting user commands, and directing the system resources to handle the requests. With this mode of interaction with the system, the user is usually not too concerned with the hardware details of the system.

In addition to the above listed major functions, an operating system also performs few other functions such as keeping an account of which users (or process) use how much and what kinds of computer resources, maintainance of log system usage by all users, and maintenance of internal time clock.

Measuring System Performance

The efficiency of an operating system and the overall performance of a computer system are usually measured in terms of the following:-

1.                               Throughput – Throughput is the amount of work that the system is able to do per unit time. It is measured as the number of process that is completed by the system per unit time. For example, if n processes are completed in an interval of t seconds, the throughput is taken as n/t process per second during that interval.Throughtput is normally measured in process/hour. Note that the value of throughput does not depend only on the capability of a system, but also on the nature of jobs being processed by the system. For long process, throughtput may be one process/hour: and for short processes, throughtput may be 100 process/hour.

2.                               Turnaround time – From the point of view of an individual user, an important criterion is how long it takes the system to complete a job submitted by him/her. Turnaround time is the interval from the time submission of a job to the system for processing to the time of completion of the job.Although, higher throughput is desirable from the point of view of overall system performance. Individual users are more interested in better turnaround time for their jobs.

3.                               Response time - Turnaround time is usually not a suitable measure for interactive systems, because in an interactive system process can produce some output early during its execution and can continue executing while previous results are being output to the user.Hence, another measure used in case of interactive systems is response time, which is the interval from the time of submission of a job to the system for processing to the time the first response for the job is produced by the system.

In any computer system, it is desirable to maximize throughput and minimize turnaround time and response time.

Related Post:-

What is Computer

Evolution of Computers

FireWall 

Computer Animation Tutorial,2D,3D

Some typical applications of computer-generated animation are entertain-ment (motion pictures and cartoons), advertising, scientific and engineering studies and training and education. Although we tend to think of animation as implying object motions, the term Computer Animation generally refers to any time sequence of visual changes in a scene. In addition to changing object position with translations or rotations a computer-generated animation could dis-play time variations in object size, color, transparency, or surface texture.Adver-tising animations often transition one object shape into another.:- For Example, transforming a can of motor oil into an automobile engine, Computer animations can also be generated by changing camera parameters, such as position, orientation and focal length. And we can produce computer animations by changing lighting effects or other parameters and procedures associated with illumination and rendering.

Many applications of computer animation require realistic display. An ac-curate representation of the shape of thunderstorm or other natural phenomena described with a numerical model is important for evaluation the reliability of the model Also, simulators for training aircraft pilots and heavy equipment operators must produce reasonably accurate representations of the environment. Entertainment and advertising applications, on the other hand, are sometimes more interested in visual effects. Thus, sciences may be displayed with exaggerated shapes and unrealistic motions and transformations. There are many entertain-ment and advertising applications that do require accurate representations for computer generated scences.And in some scientific and engineering studies, real-ism is not a goal. For example, physical quantities are often displayed with pseudo-colors or abstract shapes that change over time to help the researcher un-distant the nature of the physical process.

Design of Animation Sequences

In general, an animation sequence is designed with the following steps:-

·         Storyboard layout

·         Object definitions

·         Key-frame specifications

·         Generation of in-between frames

This standard approach for animated cartoons is applied to other animation applications as well, although there are many special applications that do not follow this sequence. Real time computer animations produced by flight simulators, for instance, display motion sequences in response to settings on the aircraft controls. And visualization applications are generated by the solutions of the numerical models. For frame-by frame animation, each frame of the scene is separately generated and stored.Later, the frames can be recorded on film or they can be consecutively displayed in “real time playback” mode.

The storyboard is an outline of the action. It defines the motion sequence as a set of basic events that are to take place. Depending on the type of animation to be produced, the storyboard could consist of a set of rough sketches or it could be a list of the basic ideas for the motion.

An object definition is given for each participant in the action. Objects can be defined in terms of basic shapes, such as polygons or splines.In addition; the associated movements for each object are specified along with the shape.

A key frame is a detailed drawing of the scene at a certain time in the animation sequence. Within each key frame, each object is positioned according to the time for that frame. Some key frames are chosen at extreme positions in the action; others are spaced so that the time interval between key frames is not too great. More key frames are specified for intricate motions than for simple, slowly varying motions.

In between are the intermediate frames between the key frames. The number of in betweens needed is determined by the media to be used to display the animatin.Film requires 24 frames per second, and graphics terminals, are re-freshed at the rate of 30 to 60 frames per second. Typically time intervals for the motions are set up so that there are from three to five in betweens for each pair of key frames. Depending on the speed specified for the motion, some key frames can be duplicated. For a 1-minute film sequence with no duplication, we would need 1440 frames. With five in between film sequence with no duplication, we would need 1440 frames. With five in between for each pair of key frames, we would need 288 key frames. If the motion is not too complicated, we could space the key grams a little farther apart.

There are several other tasks that may be required, depending on the application. They include motion verficatin, editing, and production and synchronization of soundtrack. Many of the functions needed to produce general animations are now computer generated. Please check Example of Computer generated frames for animation sequences……

General Computer Animation Functions

Some steps in the development of an animation sequence are well suited to computer solution. These include object manipulations and rendering, camera motions and the generation of in between, Animation packages, such as Wav-front for example, provide special functions for designing the animation and processing individual objects.

One function available in animation packages is provided to store and manage the object database. Object shapes and associated parameters are stored and updated in the database. Other object functions include those for motion genera-tion and those for object rendering. Motions can be generated according to specified constraints using two-dimensional or three-dimensional transformations, Standard functions can then be applied to identify visible surfaces and apply the rendering algorithms.

Another typical function simulates camera movements. Standard motions are zooming, panning, tilting.Finally, given the specification for the key frames; the in-betweens can be automatically generated.

Related Post:-

What is Animation

Hardware Requirements for animation
Software Requirements for animation

Advantages of Firewall

Computers are constantly under the threat of being attacked by viruses, spyware and hackers. All organizations have critical and confidential information which can be accessed by hackers for misuse; a potential risk for any business. For this reason, it’s very important to incorporate security features when setting up a large or small business IT network in or around the Toronto area.

Using firewalls is one of the best ways to maintain network security and it’s an essential part of a company’s network protection system. Security software regulates the traffic between your network and the other networks that you access; it prevents unauthorized access to your network while allowing authorized access to continue as normal. With a firewall in place, an unauthorized attempt to access the can be blocked and encrypted, or allowed at the user’s discretion. An inner-network activity log is always maintained.  

You may have the best antivirus software installed on your computer, but only when it’s combined with a firewall is it most effective. Compatible firewall protection may be purchased directly from one of the antivirus companies, or from places offering managed IT services in Toronto or other parts of Ontario. It is very important to have a firewall if you have a computer network. It is advised that any business install it on each and every computer of its network. This way, if one computer within a network gets infected by a virus, it does not infect the other computers within the same network. 

If you’re not sure which antivirus software is best for your computer, you can seek the help of any company that provides computer support in Brampton, Markham, Vaughan or other areas in the GTA.

There are primarily two types of firewalls: software and hardware. Firewall software runs in the background of a computer. It captures each and every network request and decides whether it is authorized or unauthorized. A software firewall is not very expensive and it can be installed very easily once you identify the right version according to the operating system that you use.

Firewall hardware is normally a small box that is fitted between your computer and your modem. It offers better protection and you can use it on more than one computer; it doesn’t matter what type of operating system your computers operate on.

Firewall-How does it work

The Internet is vital for everyday business communication, accessing important data and information exchange, but with the use of this tool comes the threat of people who may attempt to access your network with harmful intentions. Hence, it has become imperative to control the access to the information in your databases. You can do so with the help of a solid firewall; any professional IT consultant in Toronto or outside of the city would agree.

What is a firewall?

Think of a firewall as a traffic policeman who controls and restricts the traffic between your computer the Internet. It’s a must when setting up large or small business IT networks in Toronto and the Greater Toronto Area. With a firewall installed, all information within the internal network of an organization is protected from the numerous computers connected to the web.

How does it work?

Each computer in has a unique IP address that enables it to connect to other computers, which allows other users to transfer files to and from other computers in the network. While the Internet has many safety features that control the access from different computers -- and most people do adhere to privacy protocols -- the risk of unauthorized access to your computer remains generally high.

Firewalls save a record of IP addresses and help you to control external access to your computer. When a computer tries to access your computer you receive an alert; then it’s up to you to authorize access. You can program your firewall to authorize access to desired computers or networks, and restrict the access of unwanted computers or networks. This is extremely useful in reducing the threat of viruses, spyware and malware; it even protects your computers from potential hackers.

Using a firewall protects the data and information that is sent along your office network, so it is a must for any business and individual to install one for any computer in use. Any unauthorized access to your computer can leave your personal or professional information exposed to hackers who may use your confidential information for selfish or destructive motives.

A good firewall can go a long way in protecting your network from any unauthorized access. If you’re in the area, you can seek advice from companies that provide IT support in Toronto, Mississauga, Oakville or other parts of the GTA to help with firewall installation and any other security needs your network may gave.