Security threats to an e-business
As securing data and servers is critical to an organization's successful functioning, this article talks about the network and security level threats as well as their solutions.
Securing an organization's data and servers is critical to its successful functioning. According to a recent strategic research, 72 percent companies have no recovery plans, 60 percent of corporate data exists unprotected on PCs, 62 percent of time backup fails because of hardware and 83 percent of data loss is caused by system failures or human errors. This gives a clear picture of the vulnerability most organizations face against security threats.
An organization that implements e-business models needs to protect its models from multiple levels of threats- from pirates, hackers as well as insiders. Primary concern is to secure communication networks and data transfer between networks.
There is no lock in the world that cannot be broken. To implement effective security solutions, it is also necessary to understand the potential security threats.
Security threats can be broadly categorized into network level threats and data level threats. The network level threat is primarily from hackers and thus one needs to ensure the security of the complete network including internet, intranet, extranet, LANs and WANs. On the other hand, the data level threat is commonly from insiders and organizations must ensure the security of data when it moves from one computer to another.Network Security
Network Security threat is primarily from hackers. Hackers are individuals who intend to gain unauthorized access to a system while crackers are the hackers with criminal intent. A large number of potential security threats can be prevented simply by encrypting data, securing servers and designing a proper physical network.
Following are some of the common techniques that hackers and interlopers use:
Solution to network level threats
A basic network security model would consist of three things: firewall, router and packet filters. The significance of three is stated below.Data Security
Data communicated between two business parties needs to be confidential and unaltered. The original data, if altered by unauthorized parties, may add new terms or deny of previous commitments made by the parties involved in the online transaction. This type of attack is more commonly made by insiders and competitors.
Solution to data level threats
The most effective way to secure data is to encrypt it i.e., to transform the plain text into cipher text. Cipher text cannot be read by anyone other than the sender and the receiver. This can be done in two ways: either every occurrence of a letter can be systematically replaced by another or the letters of each word can be ordered in some systematic way.
Following are the different kinds of cryptographic techniques that e-business organizations use:
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