Submitted by “Researchers at North Carolina State University have developed a method to restore a computer operating system to its former state if it is attacked. […] The concept involves taking a snapshot of the operating system at strategic points in time (such as system calls or interrupts), when it is functioning normally and, then, if the operating system is attacked, to erase everything that was done since the last ‘good’ snapshot was taken – effectively going back in time to before the operating system attack. The mechanism also allows the operating system to identify the source of the attack and isolate it, so that the operating system will no longer be vulnerable to attacks from that application. The idea of detecting attacks and resetting a system to a safe state is a well-known technique for restoring a system’s normal functions after a failure, but this is the first time researchers have developed a system that also incorporates the security fault isolation component. This critical component prevents the operating system from succumbing to the same attack repeatedly.”
And it doesn’t even cost anything. It is called Comodo Time Machine. It is great for dealing with customers who are “click happy” or have kids that can break a Sherman tank with a toothbrush.
http://www.comodo.com/home/data-storage-encryption/data-recovery.ph…
I gave CTM and installed it on my GF’s machine along with mapping her My Documents to a separate drive so I wouldn’t have to worry about setting exemptions for CTM or having a complicated way to set up offsite backups (now she just copies her pictures folder to an 8GB flash, easy peasy) and frankly it turned out to be a lifesaver.
She had to rush in because she had forgot she had errands before work and forgot to log off, and wouldn’t you know it her niece came by for a visit and managed to screw up the system 32 DLLs installing some junk freeware games. The poor thing wouldn’t even get to the XP boot screen before it would BSOD. With my girl living 2 hours away (she had to move back to the family farm after her dad had a heart attack) I just can’t pop over and fix things, but with CTM all she had to do was hit F11 and it took me less than 5 minutes to walk her through a restoration. In 15 minutes flat she was back on the net like nothing ever happened.
So if anybody here has had to deal with “click happy” relatives or customers and are tired of reinstalling Windows I would heartily recommend CTM. It is free, takes less than 10 minutes to install, and it automatically makes snapshots both daily and before you install software. It’ll even play nice with system restore, although why you’d want system restore when you have CTM is beyond me.
This is silly. ZFS already provides that functionality (as well as many other functions). When you take a snapshot of the Solaris system disk (this takes 1 sec) it will show in GRUB. When you boot, you choose which snapshot you want to boot into. Just boot into any earlier snapshot, and delete the unstable snapshot.
Yes, ZFS rocks. It is the best thing since sliced bread.
I was going to post something along those lines too, but then remembered that I’ve already made too many pro-ZFS comments on here already and are starting to sound like a fanboy
The original article is vague in one regard – is-it for a specific operating system or is-it general for any OS on a X86 architecture? The later case would be quite interesting.