midterm # 3

Midterm Question #3

Internet if properly maximized can be used as a medium to the advantage of the company. However, risks and threats are there. Thus, research the following:

1. Identify the possible risks and threats (eg. virus) that can potentially attack a company with internet connection.

ans: A company will generally have multiple risks associated with them. Equipment failure, theft, or misuse can affect hardware, while viruses, upgrade problems, or bugs in the code may affect software. By looking at the weight of importance associated with each asset, you should then prioritize which assets will be analyzed first, and then determine what risks are associated with each.Once you’ve determined what assets may be affected by different risks, you then need to determine the probability of a risk occurring. While there may be numerous threats that could affect a company, not all of them are probable. This happens more often than you’d expect, especially when you consider that security is a tradeoff. . A company may have broadband Internet connectivity through a T1 line for employees working from computers inside the company, and live with the risk that they may download malicious programs. While this is only one possible situation where a company will live with a potential threat (and gamble that it stays “potential” only), it does show that in some situations, it is preferable to have the threat rather than to lose a particular service.

refernces: http://www.windowsecurity.com/articles/Risk_Assessment_and_Threat_Identification.html

2. Case research and analysis:
2.a Identify one company that had experienced an attacked from the internet.

ans: DoubleClick Inc.- The company that serves up online advertising to hundreds of commercial sites.

2.b Describe the attack.

ans: The attack followed one on four major search engines Monday, but it was not clear whether the two incidents were related.Beginning about 10:30 a.m. yesterday, DoubleClick's Internet servers began to receive a flood of bogus Web page requests, creating a bottleneck that blocked many major sites from displaying ad images.That jam in turn made it difficult for Internet users to reach certain pages at nearly all of the Internet's 40 most-visited Web sites. At the height of the assault, affected Web pages were available less than 25 percent of the time,The DoubleClick attack today appears similar in nature to the assault hackers waged last month against Akamai Technologies, a company that distributes Web content for companies such as Google, Microsoft and Yahoo. In that attack, hackers apparently directed tens of thousands of hijacked computers to overwhelm Akamai's DNS servers, blocking access to many of the company's customers for nearly two hours.The attack on DoubleClick suggests that hackers are beginning to target key Internet pressure points .t

refences: http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/articles/A19342-2004Jul27.html

2.c Identify the damages done and the solutions adopted to reverse the damages and to protect the company from future threats.

ans:

(Brand risk) ......Every organization with an identity has a brand that it must manage and protect to survive and prosper. A brand can be embodied in a globally advertised symbol or expressed by the renown of partners in a company that bears their names. However it is projected, the importance of the brand to sustainability of an enterprise has never been greater.The irreparable damage done to a brand owner's business following crisis or catastrophe may substantially outweigh the immediate and visible costs. A risk management framework without proper insight into the role of brand is incomplete.brand equity risk, reputation risk and structural risk.This is because many cases of brand damage result from other operational failures.Understanding your brand and the nature of brand risk is the first step towards protecting your brand from possible failure - and towards improving its value performance in the process.

refences: http://www.marsh.com.au/BrandRisk.htm

Cite your reference.