T1 - Issues & Risks

Security considerations and the dangers inherent in extensive reliance on computing for every aspect of life

The reliance on computing for every aspect of life requires systems to be more secure than ever before. Computers are not invulnerable to attacks. All it takes for an attacker to gain access to someone else’s computer is for the attacker to find a hole in the security, like outdated software or backdoors that are usually built into software during the development process.

With computers becoming faster and more powerful, new security algorithms would have to be created to stay ahead of the processing speed and power of new computers.

The attractiveness of systems to criminals & terrorists

Computer systems are attractive to criminals and terrorists around the world due to the massive amounts of data that can be stored and can potentially be accessed without the proper security put in place. This data can be used by criminals to gain access to people's bank accounts and can then possibly be sold onto other criminals.

There are many ways a criminal can gather personal data through a computer system. They can gather personal data through fraudulent practices. Phishing is one of the methods criminals will use to gather personal data and this is done by pretending to be someone else such as, a bank or sometimes a government department, agency or public body. These are very well replicated emails that will give false information to scare the receiver of the email to give out their personal information. The information that these emails ask for will never be asked for by an actual bank or government department, agency or public body.

Blackmail is another method for criminals to gather personal data. With this method, a criminal can hack into the systems of an organisation and hold the information they have already gathered as a hostage. The criminal can threaten to delete or release the information if they are not given what they ask for within a certain amount of time.

Maintaining compatibility with existing internal systems

Updating the internal systems can cause issues with software that have been specifically written for them. The software could not be compatible with the new hardware and will require an update itself or a completely new version.This can cause disruption to the organisation and could potentially cause some serious issues if not planned out accordingly.

Maintaining compatibility with existing external systems

An organisation will update their internal systems with new software to get ahead of other organisations, but doing this means that anybody using a program that requires a connection to those systems will also have to update. If there are users that choose not to update, this means that they could be vulnerable to attacks or may not be able to use that program at all.

Changes in working practices

Bring Your Own Device (BYOD) is an open network that is being setup in many organisations around the world. It allows employees to access the internet and their work on their own mobile devices, without the organisation having to give out a password to each individual employee and risking the security of important data. This allows employees to remotely work and this can improve the amount of work that is being produced.

Increasing complexity of IT systems controlling mission-critical applications

IT systems are becoming increasingly more complex, especially with the itegration of them and now having control of systems such as, banking and finance, electricity generation and transportation. Some of these sysems are in control of mission-critical applications. These are very important systems that if they were to fail, they can affect an organisation so much that the failure could put them out of business, affect a large portion of the population or even cause loss of life.

As an example, mission-critical systems control medical systems, air traffic control and some military systems. These systems have been tested thoroughly to make sure that there are little to no faults within the system and no outside sources are able to affect them. These IT systems are more complex than the average IT system due to the amount of protection that is required for them to keep the applications running with no faults.

Information overload and the difficulty and expense of processing large quantities of data, danger of and consequences of data duplication

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Difficulty of ensuring complex systems are reliable, fully tested and 'Fail safe'

With mission-critical systems being so complex, it is extremely difficult to ensure that they are always able to withstand an unexpected situation. Tests are extremely detailed to try and combat as many situations as possible. Considering missions-critical systems have to try and deal with real-world situations, it is impossible to test for every single situation.

One method for developers to make sure that a system does not do as much as damage when it fails, is to implement a 'fail safe' feature. This feature is designed to stop the failure from doing any more damage to other systems that are connected.