Description of the flash game
This funny flash game gives you a chance to take revenge on the computer that has been bugging you for years. Remember, he broke and hung, so now it's time to take revenge on him. You will definitely be relieved of a lot of stress, but remember, we do not recommend repeating this with your real computer.
Each user, for sure, had an old computer that constantly hung up and broke down at the most inopportune moment. Remember how you wanted to hit him with something strong at that moment. Now you are just such a moment, in the game "Break the Computer" you will be able to release all your anger. Here you can watch how your computer will be destroyed. When you open the game, a computer window will open in front of you, which will be buggy. After that, you will see in front of you full computer. Clicking on the monitor system unit, mouse or keyboard big fist will hit them. As a result of numerous blows to parts of the computer, it will be completely destroyed, so its recovery will no longer be possible. This is a great way to relieve emotional tension if your computer is constantly freezing, but do not try to repeat all this with your home computer, it is dangerous. Come into the game every time your computer is buggy, here you can release the accumulated anger. You can play this flash game on the site computer games where you can do it for free. You will not need to download the application and spend a lot of time installing it. You just need to go into the application and wait for the download, after that you can play it for an unlimited amount of time.
Users of computers, laptops and other similar devices are always afraid of virus attacks. For many, security comes first, as the fear of losing access to their documents or even never seeing them again is too great.
However, one should not think that computer viruses is the worst thing that can happen to you. After all, your computer still has a USB port. A flash drive can be inserted into it, which can carry malware- and can deal a much more terrible blow.
New type of threat
Computer viruses are undoubtedly extremely dangerous, and you need to protect your computer from their effects in every possible way - using antivirus programs and not visiting dangerous sites. However, a new type of threat has reached a completely new level - now it poses a danger not to your files, but to your computer itself, that is, it is aimed at the physical destruction of the device. A USB killer is a device that looks like a standard USB flash drive but is not. It was created by a Russian security research company. Instead of storing data, which is what regular flash drive, this device acts as a full-fledged cyber-weapon. To do this, it sends a charge of electricity through the USB port, burning the inside of the computer. It can be used for various purposes - as a virus or as a self-destruct device (although this option looks more like a spy thriller than reality).
How does the killer work?
In a post on my blog Russian company stated that the USB killer can destroy almost any device that is equipped with a USB interface. The technical details are unknown, so these messages should not be taken seriously, but, most likely, the device acts instantly - discharging the capacitor completely, that is, letting "minus 220 volts" through the USB interface. For the first time messages about this device appeared at the beginning of this year, around March - and since then the USB killer has gained a lot of popularity on the Internet.
Caution
As experiments on video on the network show, the USB killer destroys all important elements of the computer, including motherboard and HDD. The laptop or computer itself will work if you replace the motherboard with a new one, although this replacement will be quite expensive. However, the hard drive cannot be restored, as well as all the data that was stored on it. Even though the USB killer is a threat that has not yet been confirmed, you still need to be careful when using unverified devices, in particular USB drives.
If earlier you could be sure that a virus scan would allow you to immediately notice all possible threats, now there is a possibility that it will not have time to get to the antivirus scan - your computer will burn out earlier. So try to minimize the use of unverified unfamiliar devices, especially flash drives, as they can pose a real threat to your computer.
Destroying evidence and covering up traces is the lot of not the most law-abiding citizens. Today we will talk about how to guarantee the removal of information from various media in cases where you are going to sell, donate or simply throw away a disk, phone or computer.
I will say a banality: in different types devices ways of storing information vary greatly. Moreover, the methods of deleting recorded data are also different. For users of "regular disks" - with rotating magnetic platters and without encryption - it is the deletion (overwriting) of data from other types of media that often causes surprise and misunderstanding. So let's start with magnetic disks.
How to destroy information on a hard drive
In this section, by the term "hard disk" we will mean a classic device with rotating platters and moving electromagnetic read-write heads. The information written to the plate remains on it until the moment when the data is overwritten.
The traditional way to delete data from magnetic disks is formatting. Unfortunately, at using Windows even completely formatting a drive can produce different - and sometimes unexpected - results.
So, if you use an OS on Windows XP (or even more old version Windows), when the disk is completely formatted, the system will not write zeros to each sector at all. Instead, the OS will just look for bad sectors by sequentially reading data. So if you're going to throw old computer working under Windows control XP, format the disk in command line by setting the parameter /p:<число проходов> . In this case, the format command will overwrite the contents of the disk with zeros as many times as specified by the parameter<число проходов>. Example:
$ format D: /fs:NTFS /p:1
Beginning with Windows Vista Microsoft developers have changed the logic of the team full formatting. Now formatting the disk does indeed overwrite the data with zeros, and the /p option becomes redundant.
Actually, for regular user, not suffering from paranoia, that's where it all ends. Users, more than usual concerned about the security of deleted data, can recall the methods that existed a couple of decades ago (very expensive, by the way), with which you can try to recover data on special equipment by analyzing the residual magnetization of the tracks. The theoretical idea of the method is to detect traces of information that was previously recorded on the track by analyzing the weak remanence (a variation of the method is the analysis of edge magnetization, when trying to read data from the gaps between the tracks). The method worked fine for cabinet-sized drives and electromagnets that could rip off a military cockade. The method showed noticeably worse results on disks with a volume of tens of megabytes and worked very poorly with drives whose volume was close to a gigabyte (no, this is not an error, we are talking about megabytes and gigabytes here).
For modern drives with high recording density, the volume of which is measured in terabytes, there are no confirmed cases of successful application of this method, and for drives using "tiled" SMR recording, the approach is impossible in principle.
However, in order to exclude even the theoretical possibility of its use, it is enough to overwrite the disk not with zeros, but with some sequence of data - sometimes more than once.
Algorithms for guaranteed destruction of information
Many organizations use special procedures for the disposal of information storage devices, implying their sanitation (irretrievable destruction of information). Destructive methods are used to destroy truly secret information, but for data that is not of particular value, it is also permissible to use software algorithms. There are many such algorithms.
Let's start with the widely known but misinterpreted American standard DoD 5220.22-M. Most free and commercial applications that support this standard refer to the old (pre-2006) revision of it. Indeed, from 1995 to 2006, the “military” standard for destroying information allowed the use of a data overwrite method. The standard called for a three-fold overwriting of the disc. The first pass recorded any character, then its XOR compliment, and finally, in the last pass, a random sequence. For example, like this:
01010101 > 10101010 > 11011010* * random data
Currently, this algorithm is not used by the military; for sanitation, carriers are physically destroyed or completely demagnetized, as they say, "in the crucible of a nuclear explosion." However, to destroy unclassified information, this algorithm is still used in various US government agencies.
Canadian police destroy unclassified information using their own DSX utility. The utility overwrites the data with zeros, then with ones, after which it writes to disk a data sequence encoded with information about the utility version, date and time of data destruction. Secret information is still destroyed along with the carrier.
More or less like this:
00000000 > 11111111 > 10110101* * predefined coded sequence
Bruce Schneier, a well-known expert in the field of cryptography, proposes to destroy information in a similar way. The algorithm proposed by him differs from the Canadian development only in that the third pass records not a predetermined data sequence, but a pseudo-random one. At the time of publication, this algorithm, which uses a random number generator to overwrite, was criticized as slower than algorithms that write a predefined sequence of data. Today (as well as yesterday and the day before yesterday) it is difficult to imagine a processor that can somehow load such a simple task, but at the time of the publication of the algorithm in 1993, there were i486 class processors operating at frequencies of the order of 20–66 MHz ...
More or less like this:
00000000 > 11111111 > 10110101* * pseudo-random data
Germany has taken a slightly different approach to destroying unclassified data. The BSI Verschlusssachen-IT-Richtlinien (VSITR) standard allows the use of two to six passes (depending on the classification of information) that alternately record a pseudo-random sequence and its XOR compliment. The last pass is to write the sequence 01010101.
More or less like this:
01101101* > 10010010** > 01010101 * pseudorandom sequence 1 ** XOR compliment of pseudorandom sequence 1
Finally, as a technical curiosity, we present the algorithm of Peter Gutman, who proposed overwriting in 35 passes. Published in 1996, the algorithm was based on a theoretical assumption of a residual magnetism level of 5% and already at the time of publication looked like just a theoretical refinement. Nevertheless, this algorithm is supported by many applications for destroying information. In fact, its use is redundant and completely meaningless; even a triple rewriting of information using any of the algorithms described above will give exactly the same result.
What algorithm to use? For modern (not older than 10–15 years) hard drives a single rewriting with a pseudo-random sequence is more than enough for reliable destruction of information. Everything that is done beyond this can only calm the internal paranoia, but in no way reduce the likelihood of successful information recovery.
A new type of malware paralyzes a computer when it is detected by anti-virus scans, dealing a catastrophic blow to its victims.
The virus, named by Cisco Systems as Rombertik, intercepts any, even the simplest text, entered in a browser window. Further, according to a Cisco's Talos Group blog post dated this Monday, the virus is being spread through spam and phishing emails.
Rombertik easily performs several series of checks after it is launched on a Windows computer and continues to act, determining whether it is detected by antivirus programs.
It should be noted that this behavior is not unusual for some types of malware, but Rombertik "is unique in that it actively tries to destroy data on a computer if it detects certain traces of malware analysis," as Ben Baker and Alex described the virus. Chiu from Talos Group.
Similar malware (“Wiper”) was used in attacks against facilities located in South Korea in 2013 and in an attack against Sony Pictures Entertainment last year. Both attacks are attributed by the US government to North Korea.
The last Rombertik check is the most dangerous. It calculates a 32-bit hash of a resource in memory, and if this resource or compile-time has been changed, Rombertik starts the process of self-destruction. First, the program's target becomes the main boot record Master Boot Record (MBR) in the first sector hard drive The PC that the computer uses to boot the operating system. If Rombertik cannot access the MBR, it destroys all files in the user's home folder, encrypting each with a random RC4 key.
After the MBR or home folder has been encrypted, the computer restarts. MBR gets into an endless loop, preventing the computer from booting. The message “Carbon crack attempt, failed” appears on the screen.
Once installed on a computer, the virus unpacks itself. About 97 percent of the decompressed file is created in such a way as to make it look like real code. The virus consists of 75 images and 8000 false functions that are never actually used.
"This virus tries to make it impossible for antiviruses to view every feature," Talos wrote.
He also tries to avoid getting into sandboxes, or practices quarantine for a while until his check is over. Some malware tries to wait out this period, hoping to wake up and take action after that.
Rombertik remains active and writes one byte of data to memory 960 million times, making it difficult for antivirus programs to analyze.
“And if the antivirus is trying to fix all 960 million records at this time, the log file size can increase to 100 gigabytes,” Talos wrote.
We are used to the fact that files are deleted very simply - just select them and press the "Del" key or select the appropriate item in the menu. Then you can empty the "basket". Is the file permanently deleted? No - only the file entry in the file table has been deleted. Imagine a reference book from which pages with a table of contents were torn out - the situation is very similar. There is no table of contents, but the pages themselves have survived and are very easy to read.
Even a formatted disk contains a fair amount background information, especially if "quick" formatting was used. In order to actually delete data from the disk, more sophisticated methods must be used. They can be divided into three categories.
First of all, this physical drive. If you break the disk with a hammer or throw it into a vessel with sulfuric acid, it will be impossible to recover the information. It is clear that such radical methods are suitable only in exceptional cases. Another option involves the use of demagnetizers, this method used in commercial structures and government agencies in some countries.
The most common is the software method of destroying information. To destroy a file, special program writes some information over it, usually a pseudo-random alternation of numbers. But even in this case original file can still be read, so to permanently delete it, it is necessary to repeat the overwriting cycle five to seven times.
One of the best programs for normal household use is free utility file shredder. It allows you to permanently delete both individual files and folders, and entire disk data. The corresponding command is embedded in context menu which is very convenient.
Ccleaner program- convenient in that it destroys not only the selected data, but also a variety of garbage that accumulates in the system and can contain confidential information. It works quite reliably, has a Russian interface.
Acronis Disk Director Suite. The program is used to work with hard disk partitions, but it also has the function of destroying information. Does not know how to work with individual files, can only destroy data on the selected partition This program convenient to use when reinstalling the OS: select the function of formatting the disk with data destruction, and then install operating system.
Considering that the destruction of information is time-consuming and not always reliable, recently another method of information protection is increasingly being used - cryptographic. All information on the disk is encrypted according to a special algorithm, so even the theft of a computer does not pose a threat - it is impossible to decrypt information without knowing the key.