 | By Ian “Gizmo” Richards One of the most common ways of getting a malware infection is by downloading and installing a seemingly legitimate program that has actually been tampered with. You can seriously reduce the risk of this kind of infection by using a free checksum program that makes it easy to validate files before you open them. |
Using checksums to validate downloadable files
The idea of using a checksum calculated from a set of data to validate the accuracy of that data is not restricted to file downloading; it is commonplace. Take, for example, your credit card.
Whenever you give someone your credit card number, it’s important that they get it exactly right. However, there’s always a chance that you or the person recording your card number will make a mistake. To guard against these transcription errors, credit card companies have built in a simple checking mechanism to ensure the validity of the card number.
The last number on your credit card is not part of your account number but is a check digit. If you apply a standard formula to all the other numbers on the card, you should end up with a number corresponding to the check digit. If you don’t, something is wrong.
An example of such a formula would be to add up all the numbers on the card and then compare the last digit of the result to the check digit. So if your numbers added up to 72, the check digit should be 2.
Related posts:
