Technology policies and planning are important factors in maintaining a business
Technology policies and planning are important factors in maintaining a business’s technological assets and data security. Identify a potential contemporary technological breach in your business.
How might this event been avoided?
Lately, major companies have had some sort of security breach. It seems like every time you turn on the television some company is being breached. Walmart hackers broke into the computer system used by the company’s development team to steal information from cash registers. Target suffered a massive security breach in which hackers accessed the personal information of over 110 million customers. Even tech giant Apple is not immune to hackers. They “broke into the iCloud accounts of many Hollywood celebrities and made off with nude photos” (fortune,2012).
Companies must be aware that when they begin to grow and become well-known they have the potential of being targeted by hackers. The more personal information that a company possesses, the more likely they are to fall victim to hackers. Every computer must have the necessary software to prevent this sort of problem from occurring. Cyber security is not an easy task to be handled. Companies should have a dedicated individual or company to monitor all their organization’s cyber activity.
I currently work for a university and there are computers in every classroom. They all contain sensitive information on them and, if they were accessed by someone who was corrupt, the information on them could be used to do harm to an individual’s reputation. Therefore, we must protect every computer that we have in the building. Our organization has the most up-to-date anti-virus available. We are constantly updating our systems and are careful of the websites that we visit. The company has everyone log off their computers when they are done working and updates are remotely uploaded to the computers at night. This is just a few of the ways that the company protects the computers that we have.
However, accidents happen and as a company you must be ready to address them. A company needs to have a decided IT department that monitors their cyber equipment to prevent accidents. Companies must have the latest in cyber security if they want to be safe.
http://fortune.com/2014/10/03/5-huge-cybersecurity-breaches-at-big-companies
Answer 2
Technology policies and planning are important factors in maintaining a business’s technological assets and data security. Identify a potential contemporary technological breach in your business.
While some might think that if anyone has data storage protection figured out, it would be the large companies used to handling it daily – unfortunately even this is not always the case, as seen in 2013 when Target, one of the world’s largest retailers, ended up having millions of customer records compromised and their data stolen.
They eventually ended up settling a class-action suit against them for ten MILLION dollars, not even accounting for the 19 million dollars Target was required to pay banks (to cover expenses from the aftermath of the breach) who had issued the cards. (Geier, 2015)
This example is a good indicator of how expensive a security problem can be. Had Target protected their data better, this unfortunate situation could have possibly been avoided, along with the countless hours of headaches that it caused people who were trying to solve it.
It highlights the importance of proper security. While the Target breach was likely caused by malware infection at point-of-sale, a small business may not require as much complexity to breach. Abrams recommends that employees all be trained on good password practices, and being cautious about allowing outside devices on the business network. (2012)
One way that they have avoided this at my workplace is to have two separate WiFi networks in place. One is a completely internal one that helps to run our inventory system and is severely encrypted and passworded, while the other is a separate network entirely that does not interact with any of the store’s internal network.
However, this means that one must be cautious when setting up the devices, as it is possible for people to steal the devices set up on the internal network. While it may be difficult to compromise a system from the outside, with access to a device like that the likelihood rises.
