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Information System Controls for Systems Reliability

Satisfactory Essays

CHAPTER 7

INFORMATION SYSTEM CONTROLS for SYSTEMS RELIABILITY

SUGGESTED ANSWERS TO DISCUSSION QUESTIONS

7.1 1. Encryption is the final layer of preventative controls in that encrypting data provides a barrier against an intruder who has obtained access to company data. Encryption employing a digital signature and a public key infrastructure (PKI) can also strengthen authentication procedures and helps to ensure and verify the validity of e-business transactions. The digital signature is some sort of identifying information about the signer that is encrypted with the signer’s private key. This identifying information can only be decrypted using the corresponding public key. Since a private key is only known to it’s owner, …show more content…

However, few people have such an extensive background, and personnel training and development are both expensive and time consuming. So, many organizations may find it necessary to accept some tradeoffs in staffing the Information Systems audit function. Since auditors generally work in teams, one common solution is to include members who have computer training and experience. Then, as audit teams are created for specific purposes, care should be taken to ensure that the members of each audit team have an appropriate mix of skills and experience. However, in today’s technological age, all internal and external auditors on an audit engagement team must have a sound understanding of basic information security concepts so that during the course of an audit, they would be able to identify, report, and communicate security risks and exposures to the security specialists on the audit team for further assessment and investigation.

7.4 To provide absolute information security an organization must follow Jeff Richards’ “Laws of Data Security.”

1. Don’t buy a computer 2. If you buy a computer, don’t turn it on.

As this humorous solution indicates, there is no way to make a system absolutely secure. However, as discussed in the text, there are numerous methods to make a system more

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