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File Integrity

What Does File Integrity Mean?

File integrity in IT refers to the process of protecting a file from unauthorized changes, including cyber-attacks. In other words, a file’s ‘integrity’ is validated to determine whether or not it has been altered after its creation, curation, archiving or other qualifying event.

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Techopedia Explains File Integrity

Tech companies have built various file integrity monitoring tools to help system administrators determine whether a file’s integrity is intact. IT pros who perform file integrity monitoring sometimes use the "checksum" method to compare two versions of a data set.

In addition, many file integrity monitoring tools use "hashing," a method of creating and comparing cryptographic keys to determine whether a file has been altered or whether it has integrity. Some of these tools feature new automated "agent-less" monitoring, which was developed to cut costs; these tools perform a more thorough job of integrity monitoring and require less work in terms of deployment and implementation.

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