How hacker could steal your information?

As oppose to explaining this topic from the technical point of view which most technical people would prefer to, I would give some examples on how hackers could steal your information the low-tech way.

The most common method of a hacker to steal your data the low-tech way is by using social engineering. It does not require any technology at all to do it this way. Scary, isn't it?
Have you ever thought that by calling your credit card company in the public could lead to data theft? Well, while you are in the airport sitting at the lounge awaiting for your flight, you decide to call your credit card company to inform them that you will be going abroad and would like to increase your credit temporarily. The most common information that you would need to provide for verification would be your credit card number, full name, address, phone number, mother maiden name and etc. Most of you would not realize that the gentlemen sitting beside or near to you have been taking notes or memorizing on all those information to be used against you. That is one example of social engineering.

With a little use of technology, a hacker could get all the sensitive information in your PC by using a bait. The technique could be as simple as placing a pen drive with the label "Financial Report xxxx" loaded with virus/trojan within the vicinity of your company. An unknowing curious employee from your company would pick it up and try to open the file in your company PC. By clicking on the "Financial Report" file, this would create a chain of event leading to information theft. The virus or trojan would infect the PC and start transferring all the targeted files to the hacker. All of these could happen in the background without you even realizing it.

These are some of the examples of the low-tech hacking technique and we have not even talk about the high tech hacking topic yet. You could always consult your technology consultant to protect yourself even better in the cyber world.

High Availability

High Availability means eliminating the possibility of single point of failure. It could mean by having redundant hardware, nodes, networks or even a data center across different geographical locations. As a result, you would get a better data and services uptime.

High availability could start as simple as having your data in multiple pen drives so that you could still continue to perform your work if any of the pen drive fail or it could be as complex as having multiple servers on different geographical locations so that your application could work even if one of the node is down.

Do not be mistaken that high availability would provide perfect or 100% uptime, remember the Murphy Law.

High availability hosting for your website and email would mean having your application running in more than one node/server at any time. This is a complex setup and you would have to consult your hosting provider if they have this services.