Independent Research Paper-Internet Security

Independent Research Paper-Internet Security

Using the Internet today, there are numerous ways to stay connected to other people also using the Internet. You can use e mail, chat rooms, and the most popular, Instant Messaging. The risks of using e mail have always been evident. Receiving and downloading e mails and attachments from people you do not know always carried the risk of downloading and infecting your computer with one or several viruses that could possibly destroy your computers operating system.

On a personal computer, the cost of having your computer destroyed due to a virus would be at the most several hundred to a thousand dollars, depending on whether the whole computer needed to be replaced. But on a computer connected to several or hundreds of other computers, such as a computer would be at a business or company, the potential to ruin hundreds of other computers, causing the loss or potential theft of confidential and very important business oriented information is very high.

Software vulnerabilities leave your business vulnerable to serious downtime. But patching can be time-consuming and expensive to maintain. Organizations need an effective patch management program that protects critical assets and makes business sense.

For the past couple years, e mail is a very popular way to conduct company oriented business and to distribute important information. Today, however, Instant Messaging is becoming an ever more popular way to conduct meetings and to pass information.

Monitoring of e-mail is now corporate policy for most institutions, but regulatory pressure has yet to be extended to IM conversations that happen on free, public networks. “There are about 60 published IM vulnerabilities”, acco...

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...ication and business transactions. But with the proper precautions and software advances, these problems can be diminished and become nearly distinct.

Works Cited

Home Network Security. Carnegie Mellon . April 5, 2004.

<http://www.cert.org/tech_tips/home_networks.html >.

Proventia M Series. Internet Security Systems. April 5, 2004. <http://www.iss.net/products_services/enterprise_protection/proventia/m_series.php>.

Henry Stephen Markus. Home PC Firewall Guide Index. April 5, 2004. <http://www.firewallguide.com/>.

Robert B. Reinhardt. ARINC Research Corporation. An Architectural Overview of UNIX Network Security. April 5, 2004. <http://www.alw.nih.gov/Security/Docs/network-security.html>.

Barbara Laswell. Information Security and Education. April 5, 2004. <http://interactive.sei.cmu.edu/news@sei/features/2000/summer/feature_4.htm>.