Chapter Summary

Companies have to trust employees, consultants, and business partners, but this group presents the greatest security threats. Natural disasters are a threat to the physical assets, but their business damage can be minimized by having up-to-date backups, and a disaster plan with arrangements to run operations offsite if a disaster strikes. The Internet provides more avenues of attack for outsiders—particularly from viruses spread through e-mail messages. The best defenses are to install all current operating system patches, to assign access rights carefully, and to monitor the computer usage with an intrusion detection system. However, denial of service attacks are particularly hard to prevent.

Encryption protects data during transmission. It is particularly useful for sending credit card data over the Internet. It can also be used to provide digital signatures that authenticate users to validate the source of messages.

The flip side of conducting more business on the Internet is a potential loss of privacy. Partly because of the way the Internet works, and partly because of the need for security, businesses track individual users. Some firms track people even further—to the point of recording most websites that they visit. With almost no laws, these companies are free to market this information to other companies. Some individuals may object to this loss of privacy. Without supervision, businesses have an obligation to establish clear and reasonable privacy policies—and to stick by those policies.

Encryption technology also makes it possible to have anonymity servers, so people can pay a fee to have an untraceable Internet presence. While it does protect privacy, this technology raises some unresolved societal issues in terms of the potential for harassment and criminal activities.