Winndows 98 Security Essay Research Paper Windows

Winndows 98 Security Essay, Research Paper

Windows 98 Security

As we know the need of data communication becomes vital in the 20th century as we call it information Age. Both business and government were concerned with security and the need for data security becomes evident. Therefore, the computer processing, centralized database storage techniques, and communication networks have increased the need for security. Under security, the information in a computer system can only be accessible for reading by authorized personnel or parties. This type of access includes printing, displaying, and other form of disclosure, including simply revealing the existence of an object. The major areas of security that Windows 98 have are local security, network security and Internet security. We are going to look at these three rings of security issues.

Local security:

Every security should start with local security. If we do not have the local environment secured, how do we expect to secure anything else. By Windows 98, there is the ability to assign two levels of password protection to every resource and will work fine for a peer-to-peer network. The inability to assign a password to a specific file does not sit well with me, if sometimes you need to protect one file in a directory but not another. For me, I like to make my exe files read-only so that others do not accidentally erase them. We can still implement a significant strategy by using Windows 98 built-in capabilities, such as, Logon. The best way to prevent a security breach is to keep someone from getting onto the network in the first place. The dialog box that we can see when we start Windows 98 is our first line of defense against someone who would try to break into our system. Even you do not connect to the network, your standalone workstation still needs security. The initial strategy to follow for a standalone workstation is to enable password protection by using the password properties dialog box that we can access by opening control panel and double clicking the password applet. Moreover, just enabling passwords does not help us very much. We can also back up our configuration changes with a policy change. The policy change reinforces the password setting that we can turn off various types of access, for example, we can turn off the control panel settings by using the options in the Windows 98 system, just like those computers at our school labs. Or we can disable network control panel, printer settings, if we are afraid that other users will add a nonexistent printer or delete the one already installed in the system. Windows 98 also implements something called a password cache. The password list file in either the main Windows 98 or our own individual profile folder contains more than just passwords for Windows 98 system. This file also remembers the password for online services, such as MSN or any other resources like network drives that we need to access. Windows 98 logon password unlocks this file, which in turn contains the passwords that unlock all the other resources we can access. As to the password itself, a minimum password length policy can help us to make it more difficult for a hacker to break into the network. Setting a minimum password length between 5 to 10 characters is usually sufficient. And, in fact, passwords that are over 10 characters long usually encourage the user to write down their passwords. For example, if we take a look at all the desks in a big enterprise, there is always a chance to see some people have a password reminder on the desk. If it happens to a computer software or hardware company, or a business enterprise with tons of secrets in their computer system. No one can really estimates how much the loss of the company would be, if an evildoer gets the access the all files.

A good password means difficult to guess which has both upper case and lower case letters contain special characters and numbers. It should be easy to remember so users do not need to write it down anywhere. Also, it should be more than six characters long, but it should be typed quickly. So some body wouldn t notice what the user types by looking the keyboard.

Good passwords also include some techniques such as:

1) If there are two short words can be combined with a special character or number such as ya-brow.

2) Substitution of numbers for letters such as 1nv01ve, instead of involve

The characteristic of bad passwords

1) Persons name or spouse, parents, pet, child, friends, boss and any bodies name.

2) A word in the English dictionary or a place. Like, write, or Seattle

3) Passwords of all same letters and it should always differ from login name and old password.

4) Never change back to the initial password assigned by the computer services for example IT-Center.

Network security:

Share-level versus user-level security: the first level of security that Windows 98 provides is share-level access control. We get to this setting by using the access control page of the network dialog box. The other level is user-level access control. Share level access control enables us to assign a password to each resource on the network. We can use the same password for each resource, or a variety of passwords. It also enables us to determine whether a user gets read-only or full access based on a password.