Everyday, we go to our desk and start up our computers. Most of us have the luxury of having it start up right away and fairly fast. However, others can go through a very slow and frustrating start-up. This can be annoying, especially if you need to check something on your computer quickly, or don't have much time to sit around and wait for it to begin. After all, time is money!

Computer data security refers to the technological safeguard and managerial procedure , which can be applied to the computer hardware , software and data to ensure that organizational asset and individual privacy are protected . In the absences of proper internal control, knowledgeable employees can steal data and program and sell them. They can add delete or change transactions in the data for fraud or misappropriation purpose. And they can do these things at the computer sites or at the remote station. Thieves called hackers in this field are interested in computerized Records because the job of accounting for the assets of many organizations has now been entrusted to the computer system. when paper money was introduced , thieves used presses ,now credit card and magnetic money are used and thieves using computers.
The data security involves:
The protection of data against accidental of malicious disclosure;
Physical protection of hardware and software against damage or destruction.
A computer system has increased in number direct interaction between these systems and data has become routine for even casual users. such openness has made it harder to maintain security moreover , computer system insecurity has also increased for the following two reasons :
1. The information found in a relatively and up to the date bank may be of sufficient hackers to seek access to it.
2. more and more people now have the skills needed to program , penetrate and manipulate data stored in the computer system.
PRIVACY:-
Computers are good at storing, classifying and retrieving data about individuals and their activities. thus, the widespread storage of personal data strong of personal data in a computer files raised the issue of data being abused. The three main issues in the potential abuses of personal privacy are:-
a) the uses of mailing lists
b) The protection of personal data.
c) The protection of commercial software.
computer security concern the issue of how to protect the computer hardware and software against damage or destruction from such hazards or fire , flood and sabotage , hence provision must be made to store important programs and data at the backup site , and to protect the computer site against disasters of this type.
No amount of protection can guard against an unforeseen disaster that could destroy equipment and related tape and disk files.
ELECTRONIC ACCESS CONTROL:-
The safeguard such as password , hardware keys and audit trails are designed to notify system managers about the person who has attempted access material and when these measures also screen out the lion’s share of the data intrusion by people without much computer knowledge.
CRYPTOGRAPHIC SECURITY:-
if sensitive information is passed over a public carrier , such as a phone line , a company may want to guard against the possibility of this line being “tapped” and the information compromised . Cryptographic security deals with the translation of communicated data in to secret codes to safeguard the data during transmission. Data encryption has long been used by the military to safeguard battle communications. The process required battle communications.
TOOLS OF SECURITY AND PROTECTION:-
PASSWORD, HARDWARE AND SOFTWARE LOCK
PASSWORD PROTECTION:-
A Password is a set of alphanumeric digits, assign to an individual or a group of individual, that the user must input before access to a computer system is granted. password can also be used to limit access to sensitive computer files , password should be changed periodically and the changes should not be communicated through the computer system on which they are used.
Passwords are not a perfect safeguard against unauthorized computer access because they are like house keys. They can be locked stolen or given away.
HARDWARE AND SOFTWARE LOCKS:-
Many high end software packages such as CAD programs use a type of hardware keys ,also called a dongle , such programs come with a special electronic “black box” which is attached to the computer’s input/output port , when the program is started , the port is checked for the presences of the key ; if the key is not present the program abort , this method allows making backup copies of the software but prevents running the software on more than one machine.
Copy protection is a software “lock” placed on a computer program by its developer to prevent the product being copied and distributed without approval or authorization copy protection often involves some unusual use of disks storage space that prevents a computer ‘operating system from duplicating the disks content’s