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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Margaret Rouse

Margaret Rouse is an award-winning technical writer and teacher known for her ability to explain complex technical subjects to a non-technical, business audience. Over the past twenty years her explanations have appeared on TechTarget websites and she's been cited as an authority in articles by the New York Times, Time Magazine, USA Today, ZDNet, PC Magazine and Discovery Magazine.Margaret's idea of a fun day is helping IT and business professionals learn to speak each other’s highly specialized languages. If you have a suggestion for a new definition or how to improve a technical explanation, please email Margaret or contact her…