Common Vulnerabilities Facing IT Managers Essay

TCP/IP is a protocol which transfers data across a network. It allows two different computers to communicate well even if they use different codes. Putting both computers into a new common code language which both computers

name that other computers use to identify one another in a network. Internet protocol is

To start off with I chose to go with our banking or financial industry. The banking industry is constantly getting attacked by various methods on a daily basis. I chose this industry because I happen to know someone who works in the security sector at Wells Fargo Bank, he was a good person to get information on what he sees on a daily or weekly basis. This paper is the opinion of myself and with gathered information from various resources.

Transmission Control Protocol/Internet Protocol (TCP/IP) are the basic communication protocols, which were designed to provide low level support for internetworking. This term is generally also used to refer to a more generalised collection of protocols developed by the internet community and U.S. Department of Defence.

The next step is to identify the risks, threats and vulnerabilities. Hackers attack from the Internet, failure of hardware or software systems, or network outages are the most common threats. And common vulnerabilities are absence of firewall and antivirus software, absence of update patches, not adequately trained associates etc.

In addition, the company can benefit from a distinctly higher level of productivity as well as an increase in the morale of staff as a result of putting in place this technology. In other instances, it has been argued that putting in place this technology will be key in ensuring that the company’s intranet will be a helpful aid in ensuring that each of the store’s managers and employees will be able to clearly track their sales and inventory (Zhang & Li, 2009). Considering the fact that the company is a retailer that is growing retail store, the use of iPads will be critical in ensuring an automation of the store’s processes of supply chain which will be an aid in enabling them to efficiently receive inventory and ensuring that the pricing of shelf labels as well as in performing of markdowns (Fosso et al,

Wal-Mart currently has one of the most advanced inventory management systems due to their use of RFID tracking capabilities. Every product is equipped with a radio frequency identification tag, which identifies the location and type of product in the warehouse. As the product leaves the warehouses, there are readers in place at the door that automatically recognize which products are leaving and entering the warehouse. The benefit of this is that it limits the use of employees better employed elsewhere and has impeccable accuracy, much more accurate and faster than if employees were to take inventory. The service that our product provides is to take this current technology and to implement it at a grocery stores as well as retail in the

Riordan Manufacturing a global plastics manufacturer is taking the next step to upgrade the existing infrastructure with new wireless technology which will provide a better communication link. With new systems and servers the ability to maximize the company’s profits will increase overnight. The new inventory system will allow the stores POS systems to alert the warehouses to ship more products when they are running low automatically. This will eliminate the need of wasted man hours checking the stock.

4. Security Awareness: A large percentage of successful attacks do not necessarily exploit technical vulnerabilities. Instead they rely on social engineering and people’s willingness to trust others. There are two extremes: either employees in an organization totally mistrust each other to such an extent that the sharing of data or information is nil; or, at the other end of the scale, you have total trust between all employees. In organizations neither approach is desirable. There has to be an element of trust throughout an organization but checks and balances are just as

- Analyze the vulnerabilities - how is the critical information relayed daily and how is it protected?

Think of your organizational assets from the eyes of an attacker motivated by crime, espionage, hacktivism and even warfare. In other words, what are our Top Threats and how do we know? Interview the Chief Risk Officer and Business Unit leadership and ask them “what keeps you up at night?”. Then tie these answers to Corporate objectives and strategies in a Risk Register.

The internet matured in the 1970's as a result of the Transmission Control Protocol/Internet Protocol (TCP/IP), which is sill used today. It was adopted by the U.S. Department of Defense in 1980, and universally adopted in 1983. The usage of TCP/IP is what unites all elements of the net. Both public domain and commercial implementations of the roughly one hundred protocols of the TCP/IP protocol suite became available in the 1980's. During the early 1990's, Open Systems Interconnection (OSI) protocol implementations also became available by the end of 1991, the Internet has grown to include some 5,000 networks in over three dozen countries, serving over 700,000 host computers used be over 4,000,000 people. By December 1996, about 627,000 Internet domain names had been registered and now there are more than 30 million registered.

Information security professional’s job is to deploy the right safeguards, evaluating risks against critical assets and to mitigate those threats and vulnerabilities. Management can ensure their company’s assets, such as data, remain intact by finding the latest technology and implementing the right policies. Risk management focuses on analyzing risk and mitigating actions to reduce that risk. Successful implementation of security safeguards depends on the knowledge and experience of information security staff. This paper addresses the methods and fundamentals on how to systematically conduct risk assessments on the security risks of information systems.

The way Information Assurance works is by analyzing information contained on Network Systems, then assigning the information into corresponding threat level classifications. These classifications will be based on the following factors; “what potential value does the information hold to an organization?” and “would the subsequent release of said information cause damage to an organization and how much?” Once these evaluations have been done an organization can move on to the next step, addressing vulnerabilities of Network Systems that contain critical information. As the vulnerability assessment takes place weaknesses that are discovered should be discussed amongst security administrators. The overall outcome of this would be to patch security flaws in the system to better protect assets. At the same time administrators analyze the potential cause and effect of a potential breach in security. While in a perfect world all vulnerabilities would be addressed and fixed, but with the ever evolving technology of the 21st century and the intellect of those individuals who look to abuse their knowledge to gain unauthorized access to systems. The reality is that vulnerabilities (i.e. loopholes, exploits, etc.) will always exist it is just a matter of who finds it. The most important part of the Information Assurance process is this, eliminate all known vulnerabilities while conducting analysis to reduce

Well-known communications protocols are Ethernet, a hardware and Link standard that is ubiquitous in local area networks, and the Internet Protocol Suite, which defines a set of protocols for internetworking, i.e. for data communication between multiple networks, as well as host-to-host data transfer, and application-specific data transmission formats.