Common Vulnerabilities Facing IT Managers

Vulnerabilities are like a thorn in the side of every single organization doing business today. In the IT world vulnerabilities are bugs or flaws, a weakness, or an exposure of an application, system, device, or service which could lead to a failure of confidentiality, integrity, or availability (Liu & Zhang, 2011). They are to companies today what the black plague was to Europe in the 1300’s. It doesn’t even matter if the organization is connected to the internet or not it’s still vulnerable to some type of attack. Regardless of what a company actually produces and what its mission statement states their number one internal concern is “vulnerability”. How do IT Departments and IT Managers combat these threats? Every company has some type of Cyber Security team or department. Cyber security is defined by the United States Computer Emergency Readiness Team as protecting that information by preventing, detecting, and responding to attacks (McDowell & Householder, 2009). Every year companies spend billions upon billions of dollars in cyber security assessing and combating possible vulnerabilities of their organization's hardware and software systems, transmission media, local area networks, wide area networks, enterprise networks, Intranets, and Internet. This paper will evaluate 3 company’s networks and assess their vulnerabilities.

Company A

Weebles, Inc has several hundred employees in their main office and two hundred at the shipping plant just a few miles away. The LAN or Local Area Network uses 100 gb/1000gb connectivity speeds over Ethernet circuits. Local Area Networks cover small geographical locations and enable individual computers to communicate with each other to share information (Pang, 2011). The Wid...

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... external IP address.

Works Cited

Liu, Q., & Zhang, Y. (2011, March). VRSS: A new system for rating and scoring vulnerabilities. Computer Communications, 34(3), 264-273. Retrieved June 08, 2011, from Computers & Applied Sciences Complete.

McDowell, M., & Householder, A. (2009, May 6). Cyber Security Tip ST04-001. In US-CERT. Retrieved June 08, 2011, from CSEC610 9041 Webliography.

Valacich, J, & Schneider, C. (2012). Information Systems Today: Managing in the Digital World 5th Edition. (pp. 12-37). Pearson. ISBN-13: 978-0-13-706699-5.

UMUC. (2011). Custom Textbook for CSEC 610 (pp. 1-13). Hoboken, NJ: John Wiley & Sons, Inc. ISBN 978-0-470-92331-3.

Pang, L. (2011). The vulnerability of information systems in CSEC610. Course module 2 posted in University of Maryland University College CSEC 610 9041 online classroom, archived at: http://webtycho.umuc.edu