It means that information system is safe to hardware faults and other factors leading to impossibility to
receive needed information. First of all data backups must be done regularly. Other solutions depend on the budget and user needs -
solutions are from claster servers down to easy computer with mirrored disks and UPS. Malicious attacks breaking availability - different
kinds of DoS (Denial of Service) attacks and, particularly, virus attacks. Solutions, as you can see, are proper system design and administration.
System administrators must keep track of the last security information, install all the latest software patches and service packs, antivirus upgrades.
A good idea is to install only services which are really needed.
All data must be complete and up to date. Usually it can be broken due to hardware faults or due to program bugs, but also can be result of hacker attack. Users can see such problems often as broken indexes or sometimes as broken the whole database. Hackers like very much to change appearance of web pages on the servers they have hacked.
Only users which have appropriate rights must have access to the data. Usually it is the first thing that
users understand as computer security. Nearly all the authentifications are based on the login+password challenge. Only seldom chipcard-based
authentification is used, but biometric systems seem to be really available only in future. So standart users can count only on the two strings -
login and password. First of all, you must change all default passwords. All passwords must be so called "strong" - containing both upper and lower
case symbols, numbers and special symbols. Never use
password equal to your login! Also remember, that, accordind to different sources, 60-90% of attacks are made from inside. From this follows, that you must not
ever give your password to anybody. Remember, that there is a powerful hacker technology - social engineering - designed specially to get user passwords and other secure information in usual conversation.
Privacy is closely related to confidentiality. Near all are enjoing anonymity in the Internet, but It is really suprising how much information about surfer can be collected. This information is collected at least partially by different rating counters and often without any notice to visiter.
