Protecting Information Systems : Secure Confidential Data And Identify System Vulnerabilities

The authentication process is a necessity for safeguarding systems against various forms of security threats, such as password-cracking tools, brute-force or wordbook attacks, abuse of system access rights, impersonation of attested users, and last but not least reply attacks just to name a

Authentication of an individual to access and use files, systems, and screens is vital to

M2 – Explain the operation and use of encryption technique in ensuring security of transmitted information

The framework of security policy is defined to construct a structure by the help of which policy gaps can be identified in an easy manner. A system specific policy would assist to ensure that all employees and management comply with the policies. This is also used to maintain the confidentiality for user authentication would assist in the confidentiality aspect of security, maintain integrity (There are several limiting rules or constraints which are distinct in the relational data model and whose work is to maintain the data’s accuracy and maintain its integrity.), availability and authenticity of the system. Access controls are a collection of mechanisms that work together to create security architecture to protect the assets of an information system. One of the goals of access control is personal accountability, which is the mechanism that proves someone performed a computer activity at a specific point in time. So, the framework acts as the guideline

DTL Power Corporation is an electricity generating and distributing company headquartered in Santa Fe, New Mexico. Currently, they have 5.4 million electricity customers and 485,000 natural gas customers. Also, DTL Power has full or majority ownership of 14 nuclear reactors in 12 nuclear power plants. Additionally, it has 2 hydropower plants in the Midwest and 5 wind energy centers along the East Coast. Last year, incidents around the world involving nuclear reactors have led the company to increase security and safety regulations at its nuclear plants. Furthermore, the company is also researching additional environmentally friendly opportunities such as geothermal energy.

This paper explores seven references that report the results from research conducted on-line regarding the 2013 Target breach. According to the website “Timeline of Target 's Data Breach And Aftermath: How Cybertheft Snowballed For The Giant Retailer” (2015), the breach occurred November and December 2013 in which customers who shopped at Target locations credit and debit cards were breached and their personal information was exposed. Upon their investigation, it was determined their point of sale system was hacked. “Wikipedia” states point of sale system which is used by third party vendors has cash registers as well as barcodes which stores customer’s information. The website “What is Packet Sniffer” (2016), Packet Sniffing may have been a way the attacked happened. “RAM Scraping Attack” website indicates what RAM means and how this type of attack happens. “What is a Firewall in Networking and How They Protect Your Computers” (2014), “What is Endpoint Security? Data Protection 101” and “Why SSL? The Purpose of using SSL Certificates” websites each provide ways to reduce and/or prevent future attacks.

This paper explores seven references that report the results from research conducted on-line regarding the 2013 Target breach. According to the website “Timeline of Target 's Data Breach And Aftermath: How Cybertheft Snowballed For The Giant Retailer” (2015), the breach occurred November and December 2013 in which customers who shopped at Target locations credit and debit cards were breached and their personal information was exposed. Upon their investigation, it was determined their point of sale system was hacked. “Wikipedia” states point of sale system which is used by third party vendors has cash registers as well as barcodes which stores customer’s information. The website “What is Packet Sniffer” (2016), Packet Sniffing may have been a way the attacked happened. “RAM Scraping Attack” website indicates what RAM means and how this type of attack happens. “What is a Firewall in Networking and How They Protect Your Computers” (2014), “What is Endpoint Security? Data Protection 101” and “Why SSL? The Purpose of using SSL Certificates” websites each provide ways to reduce and/or prevent future attacks.

In today’s IT world every organization has a responsibility to protect the information and sensitive data they have. Protecting data is not only responsibility of security and IT staff but every individual is involved in protecting the information. The risks to information security are not digital only, but it involves technology, people and process that an organization may have. These threats may represent the problems that are associated to complex and expensive solution, but doing nothing about these risks is not the solution.

Any enterprise has to pay special attention to computer security. Computer security is a field that is concerned with the control of risks related to computer use. A primary focus should be on the external threats to the computing environment. In enterprise with branches cross country, it is important to allow information from "trusted" external sources, and disallow intrusion from anonymous or non-trusted sources. In a secure system, the authorized users of that system are still

Michael’s Store, Inc. is an arts & crafts Retail chain. It has more than 1040 stores located in 49 US states & Canada. The company also owns and operates the Aaron brother’s retail chain, which happens to have an additional 115 stores across the Country. Michael’s store Inc. had a Security breach, which took place between May 8, 2013 and January 27, 2014. About 2.6 million cards or about 7 percent of payment cards used at its stores during the period were affected. Alarmingly, its subsidiary Aaron brothers also had been breached between June 26, 2013 and February 27, 2014. It was reported that Aaron brothers had 400,000 cards impacted. The duration of the treacherous attack in total was 8 months (Schwartz, 2014). In this report, security breach of Michael’s store Inc. is analyzed. The topics covered are how the breach occurred, what did the authorities do to educate the customers & how in future such attacks can be avoided.

Information security is the protection of information against accidental or malicious disclosure, modification or destruction. Information is an important, valuable asset of IDI which must be managed with care. All information has a value to IDI. However, not all of this information has an equal value or requires the same level of protection. Access controls are put in place to protect information by controlling who has the rights to use different information resources and by guarding against unauthorised use. Formal procedures must control how access to information is granted and how such access is changed. This policy also mandates a standard for the creation of strong passwords, their protection and frequency of change.

Recently, Walmart bought Jet, the year-old online bulk retailer, for $3.3 billion dollars, and it was the largest deal ever for an e-commerce company (Abrams & Picker, 2016). Jet.com was known as bulking buying online store, and it was an area where Walmart.com was falling behind. However, Walmart’s e-commerce sales have stalled, and the online business grew 7 percent last quarter, but it was too slow, and the company is focusing more on its online business strategy on expanding its grocery pickup business (Abrams & Picker, 2016). Now, Walmart must manage several risks that connected the nature of e-commerce, and the risk involves security, availability, processing integrity, and confidentiality. Walmart management and executives must develop an effective plan to identify risks before it occur. Accordning to Turner and Weickgenannt (2013), the

Amazon’s core business of selling goods (ranging from books to fresh food and electronics to fashion cloths) through its e-commerce portal has seen exponential growth which necessitated a need for a massive storage and computing infrastructure that is always available and is resistant to failures. After building this, it is intuitive for Amazon to open up the infrastructure and sell it as a commodity. This helps Amazon not only to attract more customers to this new product but also to build new infrastructure thus benefiting its core business.

All access to government servers, network devices and maintenance areas of the government agency's data center will be role-based and defined through authentication at a minimum (Amsel, 1988). Access methods will require two-party authentication and for access to server operating systems and rack-mounted servers, biometrics will also be required. One of the most critical success factors to ensuring a high level of security and stability and to guard again social engineering threats is to create and maintain authentication methods that thwart illusionary and coercive-driven access attempts (Burgess, Canright, Engø-Monsen, 2004). By having several roles requires to gain access to data,

Their operations are very slick and swift such that stolen data is quickly exploited within seconds of being submitted by unsuspecting victims. Since 2005, over 400,000 databases have been compromised since 2005, and thousands more have gone unnoticed or reported. About 40 percent of those involved in IT security have no fixed figure on the number of hackings their companies have experienced. One of the rapidly increasing areas of ecommerce is in the use of web-based applications to replace traditional over-the counter transactions. Hackers have expectedly, latched on. According to a study by Gartner, over 75 percent of Internet security breaches are due to flaws and loop holes in software. The reason for this is that, applications are normally designed and put together quickly to get the system running, and no time is spend analyzing and assessing security implications. As computer hackers continue to step up their operations in line with technology advancements, the securities and future industry recorded a 150 percent increase in the number of suspicious activities detected by their systems. During the same time, research carried out at the University of Maryland indicated that a computer connected to the Internet was subject to an attempted hack every 40 seconds. The battle between ecommerce websites and consumers wages on, according to an independent analyst, ‘consumers are losing a tug of war.’ Simon Smelt, an economist who runs a survey company