The Improving Business Security - Essay Example

Running head: SECURITY AND SOFTWARE Security and Software Affiliation December 2008 What can be done to improve the security of business uses of the Internet? Give several examples of security measures and technologies you would use. In the pervious few years, there have been high profile data violation and internet hacking cases those are concerning to major businesses. Though this might present the insight that just big companies are under attack by thieves and hackers, the truth is that hackers are more and more targeting small companies for the reason that they typically do not have the resources or proficiency that big businesses do. On the other hand, that does not indicate small corporations have need of a great amount of money and assets to guard themselves for the newest threats. Actually, according to a most recent Symantec Threat Report, 82 per cent of data that was moreover gone astray or hacked could have been saved if the companies follow a straightforward cyber safety /security plan (Johnson, 2006). Consecutively to start evolution of a cyber safety /security plan, we have to distinguish the internet security threats and how we can protect our company from those security threats explicitly influence our bottom-line (Wiant, 2005). Security threats Here I will discuss few security threats those are affecting business on the internet now a days: Malicious Code: It is a software program that intrudes in your system without your permission and misplaces your data or damages your important files (Voss, 2001). Spear Phishing; unwanted and erroneous distinctiveness messages that takes your information in such way that you can’t even evaluate that these messages are from some hacker (Voss, 2001). Unsecured Wireless Internet Networks: nowadays internet can be accusable to community and mostly businesses and users are related through unsecured wireless internet network, and this assists the hacker to easily enter into others system and damage them (Johnson, 2006). Improving the security There are a number of ways to advance the security of the business that uses internet. My aim is to present only the current and latest techniques of business security. Content screening software Content screening software, a relatively most up-to-date area of business security, these are different from the previous standby antivirus software .On a firewall or desktop, they stop viruses and other attacks from dispersion and make possible the corporation to control what types of data and content be able to be brought in from the Internet. For instance, a firewall with content screening enabled software is able to restrict the downloading of ActiveX or Java code and also just accepted users and sites can be accusable to business network (Wiant, 2005). Encryption By the encryption method we can mess up the data into an indecipherable format. It is additionally safe to broadcast/ transmit encrypted data that is regarding to your business over the internet. This technique is mostly used by the internet banking sites, where data is sent in your web-browser by applying some encrypted channel. This protected system and also the messages are safely established. There are a number of encryption techniques and the results of application of encryption are really efficient in the e-business sector (Johnson, 2006). Virtual Private Networks (VPNs) Virtual Private Network or VPN is a rising inclination in the E-business. Most of the organizations are now adopting this technology to secure their data and information for the e-business. Basically this procedure is used to avoid eavesdropping on communications. Encryption is employed in VPNs so that just the parties of a conversation means that the authenticated computers communicating with other authenticated computers can have the link between them. This will facilitate in both ways first encryption secure the data transfer and second only authenticated system or users in the network have the permission to communicated and transfer the data (Wiant, 2005). 1. What major trends are occurring in software? What capabilities do you expect to see in future software packages? The basic motive behind the development of computer is to help human working and endow with an automated setting. Since the aim of innovation and development of computer was to endow with more easiness in working. Now days technology has evolved to such level that now we can say that computer science has pleased its promise of facilitating human (Abowd et al, 2000). In this era new trends are occurring in software industry. We all know that the initial computers were enormously hard to keep up and run (Gershenfeld, 1999). Although with the help of sophisticated software it becomes extremely simple to use and maintain computers. The main trends or facilities those are happening in software are: Now-a-days software has evolved flexibility. We are using them in our daily life and they become element of our life. Our daily communication depends on this software. The software running on the computer has the capability to read your brain. The software that takes commands from your eyes moment is also in ending stages of development. And this system also has no more keyboards, mouse or any input device (Jern et al, 2003). A type of software is known as expert system. These systems have the capability to react and make decision against any difficulty, query or input. These systems have their own knowledge base that is the knowledge about some explicit field, and this knowledge is taken from any human expert so that it can take the decision. It is found that these systems have more advantages against humans’ experts, because they remain available 24 hours, never tires, have no danger of death or illness. So the replacement of human experts by software experts is an emerging trend in this industry. Example of these systems is medical expert system, car diagnostic systems etc (Banavar et al, 2002). Now I will talk about the available software and their trends. Windows stands among them first. If we have a look on pervious few years then we see that the working with DOS systems was very difficult. Then by the introduction of windows all things have changed. Now windows have been developed so much. Any novice user can easily understand it’s working with in no time. Then we talk about MS Office, we see that there are numerous facilities in those software, the MS Office 2007 version is a very good example of this evolution of ease (Banavar et al, 2002). We can say this age as the age of artificial intelligence. Software is able to think now. The airplanes and jets without pilot are best example of such type of software those are controlling all their systems (Jern et al, 2003). Conclusion I have analyzed that our life is nothing without these soft wares. Mobiles on which we talk, oven in which we cook food, iPod on which we listen music, games we play on play station and several other things those are nothing without these soft wares. As I have discussed earlier the age of artificial intelligence has been started. After few years robotics and artificial intelligence system will become available widely and all this has happened only because of software evolution. References 1. Abow, G.D., and Mynatt, E. D. (2000). Charting past, present, and future research in ubiquitous computing, ACM Transactions on Computer-Human Interaction, vol. 7(1), pp. 29-58, March 2000. 2. Banavar, G., and Bernstein, A. (2002). Software infrastructure and design challenges for ubiquitous computing applications, Communications of the ACM, vol. 45(12), pp. 92-6. 3. Gershenfeld, N., (1999). When Things Start to Think. Henry Holt & Company. 4. Jern, M. Ricknas, D. Stam, F., and Treloar, R. (2003). Visual user interface for PDAs, In Proceedings Seventh International Conference on Information Visualization. International Conference on Computer Visualization and Graphics Applications, London. 5. Johnson, E. (2006). Awareness training, security awareness: switch to a better program, Network Security, Vol. 2006 No.2, pp.15-18. 6. Voss, B.D., (2001). The Ultimate Defense of Depth: Security Awareness in Your Company, SANS Institute, white paper. 7. Wiant, T.L., (2006). Information security policys impact on reporting security incidents, Computers & Security, Vol. 24 No.6, pp.448-59. Read More