THE VIRGINIAN-PILOT
Copyright (c) 1997, Landmark Communications, Inc.
DATE: Thursday, February 20, 1997 TAG: 9702200111
SECTION: BUSINESS PAGE: D1 EDITION: FINAL
SOURCE: BY LON WAGNER, STAFF WRITER
DATELINE: VIRGINIA BEACH LENGTH: 44 lines
It may sound like a snooze: a roomful of CPAs and attorneys listening to computer experts talk about data recovery.
But the stories those experts tell could give business owners some sleepless nights:
A Hampton Roads hospital with three full-time workers assigned to protect against computer viruses has its pharmaceutical records destroyed because it had no firewalls against viruses picked up on the Internet.
A 240 gigabyte computer server at a bank in the Northeast crashes. Ninety days' worth of ATM transactions disappear.
A disgruntled worker sends a ``logic bomb'' into his own company's computerized manufacturing system. Every piece of data in the system is wiped out.
Data recovery experts related those and other stories at a Wednesday morning breakfast meeting of the CPE Forum at the Holiday Inn Executive Center. They warned of a coming wave of computer crashes, data sabotage and man-made viruses that could put unprepared companies out of business.
``I would say 80 to 90 percent of what we deal with would be corporate data recovery,'' said RickMoher, who works with the computer forensics group at Ontrack in Minnesota. ``Companies are trying to get the data back and trace its loss to an individual.''
Ontrack estimates that about 93 out of 100 companies that have a disaster in their corporate data processing center will go out of business.
Gary Anderson, president of AEI Risk Management Services in Chesapeake, cautioned that a company can be liable for virus-infected disks it copies and hands out to customers.
And virus scanning software should be constantly updated, Anderson said, because about 125 new viruses are created each month.
Anderson and Moher pointed out that many companies that try to delete sensitive information from their computer systems often fool themselves into thinking they've succeeded.
Other times, a company involved in a lawsuit can intentionally wipe out data and make it look like an accident.
``If you want to get rid of data and don't want to look malicious, you can upgrade to Windows 95 and override all sorts of goodies,'' Moher said.