Hello,

I need two responses of at least 150 words each for the below students discussions for this week. Also in the bold below are the questions the students at answering.

1. What do you think is the single greatest physical threat to information systems? Fire? Hurricanes? Sabotage? Terrorism? Others? Be prepared to support your answers.

2. In a corporate, networked setting, should end users be permitted to install applications on their workstations, whether they applications are on a disk or downloaded from the Internet? What kind of judgments should people make before downloading a piece of software?

Student one:

Hello Class,

R1. This week we will be talking about things that pose threats to information security systems. The biggest threat to information systems are human themselves. Human error and human sabotage are the greatest threat to information systems. A physical threat is the potential cause of an incident that may result in a loss of the system or physical damage to the information systems.The occurrence of fire, hurricanes, or terrorism isn’t nearly as frequent as human error. Viruses are often caused because an user opens an email without thinking. But as far as the physical threats, if a user isn’t careful with the overall the physical security of the computer they are using the consequences can be detrimental. Humans are the biggest threat because we can cause the most damage even if it is on accident.

R2. I don’t think that end users should be allowed to download anything from the Internet and if it the application is on a disk, it has to be approved or done by a system administrator. . I have seen many computer crashes because of the software that was downloaded by some unwittingly user. I think there should be a policy that is put into place that prohibits downloaded software on an organizations computer without approval of the system administrator first. I think this way the system administrator can probably vet all of the potential risk that might exist in the software. I think establishing a policy would help end users understand what exactly is expected of them. I think training on why end users being allowed to download the software is a bad ideas would help mitigate any end users feeling like they are being watched.

References

Graham, James , Howard, Richard, and Olson, Ryan. Cyber Security Essentials. Boca Raton: Auerbach Publications, 2011. Print.

-Brittany

Student two:

Hello,

For this week’s forum, we are asked to discuss what we believe to be the greatest physical threat to information systems and whether or not we think employees should be allowed to install applications on their workstations. To start things off, I believe that the user is the greatest physical threat to information systems. When you start to research some of the largest overall threats to information systems, you can easily find things like viruses, Trojan horses, and various other malware. However, these threats all require some form of human interaction for the execution to begin. These user interactions can range from unknowingly compromising their credentials during a spear phishing attack to downloading software that contained a Trojan virus. Additionally, users can create situations like one that occurred in May, 2017, when an employee for British Airways caused a computer system failure, which left thousands of passengers stranded. The computer system failure occurred when the British Airways employee accidently disconnected the power supply to the airline’s data center. However, once the employee reconnected the power supply, it caused physical damage to the airline’s servers, and power units, which caused all flights from Heathrow and Gatwick airports to be canceled (Sumers, 2017).

When it comes to whether or not users should be allowed to install applications on their workstations, I believe the users should not be allowed to install applications. My reasoning behind this is that the common user, usually, does not care about whether or not the software they are downloading is safe. By allowing users to install whatever software they like causes increased work for the system administrators and creates a large array of vulnerabilities (Kozlowicz, 2017). Therefore, I believe it would be best to have standard accounts for all employees and only allow the admin account to download applications to the workstations.

Source:

Kozlowicz, J. (2017). Should You Allow Windows Users to Have Administrative Rights? Green House Data. Retrieved from https://www.greenhousedata.com/blog/should-you-allow-windows-users-to-have-administrative-rights. Retrieved on July 24, 2019

Sumers, B. (2017). Human Error Caused British Airways Computer System Failure. Skift. Retrieved from https://skift.com/2017/06/06/human-error-caused-british-airways-computer-system-failure/. Retrieved on July 24, 2019

-Charles