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Essay on Information System Security
Data Protection: Averting a Crisis
Computer has always been a tool with great problem solving potential. The challenge is to identify problems and develop appropriate computer solutions; but computer is also one of the most vulnerable machines. Security is always one of the most important concerns in the use of computers (Gasser).
There are four general categories of threats:
- Interruption: An asset of the system is destroyed or become unavailable or unusable. This is threat to availability
- Interception: An unauthorized party gains access to an asset. This is threat to secrecy. The unauthorized party could be a person, a program or a computer
- Modification: An unauthorized party not only gains access but tempers with an asset. This is threat to integrity
- Fabrication: An unauthorized party inserts counterfeit object into the system. This is a threat to integrity (Hoffman)
The two most important and most publicized threats to security are:
- Intruders
- Malicious Programs
Intruders:
An intruder is generally referred to as a hacker or cracker. Intruder attacks range from benign to the serious. Benign intruders might be tolerable, although they do consume resources and may slow performance for legitimate users. However there is no way in advance to know whether an intruder will be benign or malign.
Hackers are of two levels. The high-level attackers were sophisticated users with a thorough knowledge of the technology. The low-level attackers were the “foot soldiers” that merely used the supplied cracking programs with little understanding of how they worked.
Intruders may run the password –cracking program, attempted to modify login software to enable them to capture passwords of users logging on to systems (Pfleeger).
Intrusion Techniques:
The objective of the intruder is to gain access to a system or to increase the range of privileges accessible on a system. Generally, this requires the intruder to acquire information that should have been protected....
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