Information Security
Information Week April 20th 2009
This article was interesting in discussing the results from a study completed for Verizon’s Business risk team. The study results were based on field findings from mostly banks and retail companies. Some of the results were surprising to me.
- 99% of breached records were accessed by servers and server applications, not by computers at the direction of a user. OK so this says that the data is mostly protected from a user asking for it, but if it’s an application located on another server, then the book is open. That is such a weakness because server applications are simple to write and if the data is not protected from servers, then a simple server application could copy any item of data that the server application wishes to know.
- 74% of breaches were from external sources. This is probably the most feared type of data security breach because the data is taken by an outsider and no one knows what they might do with the data and there is no reasonable explanation for the data being taken other than for illicit use. That being said, the study showed that the biggest breaches were internal where the average number of records breached were 100,000 per breach compared to 37,000 when the breach came from an external location.
- 69% of the breaches were discovered by 3rd parties. WOW OK so this means don’t rely on your IT department to discover that you’ve been compromised. This makes sense because most IT professionals in your department will do what they can to protect your network from any intrusions that they are aware of, however they can’t protect the network from accessibility issues that they do not know about.
This take away from this article is that it’s very critical to protect the data as well as to try protect and secure the systems from undesired intrusion.
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This is my comment for Chapter 7 in the e-portfolio. I have given up trying to get it to fit there haha. Thanks
ReplyDeleteI also agree that the new wave of technology will be the RFIC tags. I know they are very valuable in supply chain management but to think that these little chips can hold virtually any information one wants is a very exciting idea. There will be privacy issues along the way I'm sure just as we have seen with other technologies however for the most part I feel that RFID will help to keep track of more important things such as keeping tabs on criminals or criminal activity and also helping with businesses in all aspects of tracking merchandise and consumer purchasing trends.
The thing that interests me the most is that 69% of the breaches were discovered by third party. For me, this raises a red flag. It is true that information breach cause by an outsider may be harder to detect, but don't you think that IT staffs of your company would have something in place to notify them if data is being access by a non network computer? I also think that there is a chance that IT department realized the breach but choose not to report it sometimes for the sake of their job and for the sake of the company reputation.
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