CompTIA Security_ Deluxe Study Guide_ SY0-201 - Emmett Dulaney [91]
Real World Scenario
Working with Smart Cards
You’ve been asked to help troubleshoot a problem that is occurring in your school’s computer lab. Students are complaining about viruses that are infecting the floppy disks they bring to school. How can you help remedy this situation?
You should ensure that all the systems in your school lab computers are running antivirus software and that this software is kept up-to-date. Doing so will prevent known viruses from entering the school’s system and being transferred to student files. You may also want to evaluate whether the school computers should have removable media installed on their systems. Several manufacturers now sell systems called thin clients that don’t provide any disk storage or removable media on their workstations. Thin clients use dedicated servers to download applications, data, and any other information they need to have in order to run. This eliminates the danger of viruses being introduced from student disks.
Tape
One of the oldest forms of removable media is magnetic tape. Magnetic tapes come in a variety of types and sizes. Older tapes were reel-to-reel and were bulky and sensitive to environmental factors such as heat and moisture. Newer tapes are cartridge or cassette oriented and are smaller and much more durable. With some of the new tape technologies, you can store on a single tape what once would have required a 10-foot-by-10-foot tape vault.
Magnetic tapes have become very fast, and they can hold enormous amounts of data. They’re commonly used to back up systems and archive old data. The major concern with tape involves physical security—a tape is easy to remove from the premises undetected.
Tape can be restored to another system, and all the contents will be available for review and alteration. It’s relatively easy to edit a document, put it back on the tape, and then restore the bogus file back to the original computer system. This, of course, creates an integrity issue that may be difficult to detect.
Tapes can also become infected with viruses, and they can infect a system during the data recovery process. Files going onto a tape drive should be scanned to ensure that they’re virus free.
One of the biggest issues when using tape has always been trying to figure out the best way to rotate sets of backups.
Real World Scenario
Understanding Tape Rotation Schemes
As an administrator, you know the importance of backups and having more than one set of data available to restore. In this exercise, you’ll use the Web to research some of the most commonly implemented tape-rotation schemes and compare /contrast them.
Using the Web, research these methods of tape rotation and look for the differences between them:
1. Tower of Hanoi
2. Grandfather-Father-Son (GFS)
3. Round Robin
You should discover that all of these are valid methods of rotating tape sets in order to maintain multiple copies that can be restored after a disaster. One method isn’t monumentally better than another, and you’ll want to identify the one that would work best in your implementation.
While tape used to be the standard for removable media, it is quickly being replaced in the market by newer technologies for backups. You need to know about tape for this exam, but for the real world, you should know that it isn’t being deployed at anywhere near the rate it used to be.
Thumb Drives
Thumb drives and flash cards come from the same family. In fact, thumb drives are nothing more than USB flash cards that allow you to store a large quantity of data on something that easily fits into your pocket. Because of their size and versatility, thumb drives have become the de facto standard