Author: Paul M Tate

A Chartered Accountant who knows a little about IT as well
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Security of information on hard disks

At a recent Banbury Tweetup (usually first Thursday of the month at the Inn at Farnborough, next one on the 9th June 2011) we discussed the security issues of broken computers and hard disks. You should always remove the hard disk or use a secure wipe tool to erase all the data otherwise it might turn up in some sort of identity theft scam later in your life.barracuda_xt_320x340

Just because a drive cannot be read by your computer (USB drives dropped on floor or USB stick/camera SD drive broken in half ) or your mobile phone sims appears duff does not mean someone could not spend time and read your life story or business secrets from it.

Did you know that an awful lot of laser printers also have hard drives/writable flash media in them, saving your documents for possible reprinting later or just caching them.

So no matter what hardware you recycle remember that you need to be careful about any personal/business information still on the hard disk or flash memory installed in them.

Remember this BBC news item, it could still happen today.bbcharddisk

There are services that can wipe and dispose of your drives safely.

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Student Finance Phishing Scam

Please please those students who get this email be very wary it is a scam:

image

the Directgov image is valid and the email purports to come from Student Finance studentfinancee@direct.gov.uk

but the link “here” is some weird scamming site:

http://afzalmulla    .com/  studentfinancegov  .htm

DO NOT CLICK IT, DO NOT GIVE INFORMATION.

If you are worried then go to the Directgov site from the address bar and make sure it is correct. They have a page explaining what to do

http://www.direct.gov.uk/en/Nl1/Newsroom/DG_191026

I went to their homepage and put Phishing in the search bar to find that, I suggest you do too.

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TVSCA e-Chartam finally published

echartamcoverAfter several months discussing with the various parties involved the first issue of e-Chartam hit the Thames Valley District Society part of icaew.com.

Various District Societies (DS) publish similar newsletters and some are printed and posted and some are available for download on their own areas of icaew.com/regions. The Thames Valley also have a printed magazine that will next hit your post boxes in early May.

stoppressThe common factor is that all the societies have trouble providing news to all their members. The newsletter was announced in Stoppress as one of the few methods the DS has of telling members it exists. The opening rate on this sign posting news email that started as something akin to e-Chartam is now very low with a subsequent issue on click throughs to the articles. I believe the Institute’s web experts advise that the size and format of Stoppress is the optimum for reader’s opening it.

outlookThe Institute has issues with being able to email small PDF’s to their members. The belief is that many members will be unhappy if they received the full PDF in their inbox. In the past I believe this was the case but with the advent of reasonable broadband and the fact that Outlook will now allow you to review a PDF in the preview window I find I am receiving more and more optimised PDF’s in my inbox. The big ones (multi-megabytes) are still links on web sites. I would be interested in your views.

Equally with the advent of the Members Preference Centre I believe the old issue of too much “spam” email from the Institute is now over, perhaps you are still on old affiliate marketing mailing lists but these are easily dealt with as no one wants to upset possible customers and the unsubscribe button will usually work.newsreview

Readers and friends will know I have been involved in Institute communications to District Society members for some time and since the demise of the centrally funded printed newsletter (News Review) I have felt that members deserve more information on what is happening locally and would welcome your views as to how you like to receive that information.

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What happens when you haven’t got a DVD drive

I fell foul of HP’s part ordering and managed to buy a small server without a DVD drive, lovely box though, an HP Proliant Microserver.

hpmicroserver

It came with hard disk and various cd’s including Windows Server 2008R2 Foundation edition.

Not wanting to slow things down I tried numerous ways to boot the Windows Install from a USB pen, finally finding the web site below where the simple commands were posted.

Looks like this will work for Windows Vista, Windows 7 as well as Windows Server 2008.

I found that it was relatively easy to create such a tool!

  1. Either mount the ISO or insert the DVD for Windows 7 or Windows Server 2008 R2 into your computer. Let’s say it’s at D:\
  2. Format your USB stick to FAT32 (I used default settings for everything via the Windows format tool). Let’s say it’s at H:\
  3. Run the following commands at a command prompt:

d:\boot\bootsect.exe /NT60 h:

xcopy d:\*.* /s /e /f h:\

At this point, you should be able to boot off of your USB stick (pending proper BIOS settings on the machine you’re booting up from) and it will install Windows off of the flash memory! Easy as that!

Thank you to Shane Milton’s Technology Update – Jaxidian Update