Attack Prevention – Article Evaluation

At every level of an organization’s structure there is a constant treat of attacks from numerous sources which can include but not limited to spyware, network policies, weak password, and personell lack of training. To analyze this attack rick prevention topic I chose an article from Information today by Phillip Britt titled “Data Security: an Ounce of Prevention”.

This article captures the readers attention by using and example of a real incident in which a laptop was stolen from an individual who worked for Aetna and had about 38,000 personal files information from clients which included their social security numbers. With this example the author emphazises the need for stricter security measures and informs the readers how can they protect the information on their computers whether it is a personal computer or a laptop.
The article highlight some of the major computer and system attack prevention methods in a condense but precise way from the top security experts. It advises the organizations to constanly educate the user about security issues with the machines and the information they manipulate on them. Recommends assigning security responsibility by someone in the firm or a third party vendor and establish and enforce user policies which include acceptable use of instant messaging, internet and other eqipment that may be available. A firewal it a must in the recommendation, since it will look for abnormal behavior in the network which are typical of virus and other malware. Also, it recomends a password authentication since it ensures that only those users that are authorized will have access to the system and warns the users againt writing their password in a pieace of paper which is left around the computer. Encryption is another attack prevention measure which as the article mentions it would have