Air-gapping

I was watching a television show and a character mentioned securing something very important by storing it on a computer that was air gapped. I had never heard of this before, but was intrigued as to what it was (or if it was even something real and not just made up for television entertainment) and learned that it is in fact real.

Air-gapping is isolating a computer from the public Internet and other unsecured networks. It is done for network security purposes. In the past, it was a much better method of securing a computer than it is today. Unfortunately, hackers have plenty of ways to get to a computer that is not on the Internet, such as infected USB drives or even radio waves. This article discusses the use of radio signals to attack air-gapped computers.

More information on air-gapping can be found here in this Wikipedia article and in this article on Wired.

Thanks for reading!

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