What do you want us to know and what do you want us to be able to do?
How to identify corruptions or changes? How to go about fixing them?
Data integrity is about ensuring stored data remains accessible and unchanged. Data should stay intact, but that isn't ways the case. Documents can be corrupted, or become inaccessible.
The idea behind data integrity is that the data you store is the same data you retrieve.
Proving a file is the same now as it was when it was sent is a fairly techy process – a thing called a “hash” (kind of like a digital fingerprint) or checksum can be calculated and compared. If the hash is the same for both the sender and recipient, then you can be sure it’s the same document – this video demonstrates the method - https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=O0s8tKTL_MA .
Trustworthy and Honest
An Excel spreadsheet is only as useful as the data it stores and the maths that it does on that data.
A Word document that randomly changes words on the page is useless if you need that data intact later.
Last example – if a SMS to your boss randomly changes the letters that they receive, it could end up leading to a very awkward conversation. A bit like autocorrect that won’t behave!
Fortunately for most of us, though, we don’t need to worry about doing hash checks. A lot of our software does file and message integrity checking for us. It will alert us if the file doesn’t pass integrity checks. However, we should be aware that files that start failing these checks or have garbage in them unexpectedly may be a warning sign that a hack attempt is in progress. It’s a warning that we shouldn’t ignore.
Lesson Takeaway – Keep an eye out for data that changes unexpectedly or files that have garbage in them. Integrity is important! Be ready to ask questions as to why data was changed.
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