What is Computer Security?

Computer security is a general term that covers a wide area of computing and information processing. Industries that depend on computer systems and networks to conduct daily business transactions and access crucial information regard their data as an important part of their overall assets. Several terms and metrics have entered our daily business vocabulary, such as total cost of ownership (TCO) and quality of service (QoS). In these metrics, industries calculate aspects such as data integrity and high-availability as part of their planning and process management costs. In some industries, such as electronic commerce, the availability and trustworthiness of data can be the difference between success and failure.

How did Computer Security Come about?

Information security has evolved over the years due to the increasing reliance on public networks not to disclose personal, financial, and other restricted information. There are numerous instances such as the Mitnick and the Vladimir Levin cases that prompted organizations across all industries to rethink the way they handle information transmission and disclosure. The popularity of the Internet was one of the most important developments that prompted an intensified effort in data security.

An ever-growing number of people are using their personal computers to gain access to the resources that the Internet has to offer. From research and information retrieval to electronic mail and commerce transaction, the Internet has been regarded as one of the most important developments of the 20th century.

The Internet and its earlier protocols, however, were developed as a trust-based system. That is, the Internet Protocol was not designed to be secure in itself. There are no approved security standards built into the TCP/IP communications stack, leaving it open to potentially malicious users and processes across the network. Modern developments have made Internet communication more secure, but there are still several incidents that gain national attention and alert us to the fact that nothing is completely safe.

Security Today

In February of 2000, a Distributed Denial of Service (DDoS) attack was unleashed on several of the most heavily-trafficked sites on the Internet. The attack rendered yahoo.com, cnn.com, amazon.com, fbi.gov, and several other sites completely unreachable to normal users, as it tied up routers for several hours with large-byte ICMP packet transfers, also called a ping flood. The attack was brought on by unknown assailants using specially created, widely available programs that scanned vulnerable network servers, installed client applications called Trojans on the servers, and timed an attack with every infected server flooding the victim sites and rendering them unavailable. Many blame the attack on fundamental flaws in the way routers and the protocols used are structured to accept all incoming data, no matter where or for what purpose the packets are sent.

Currently, an estimated 945 million people use or have used the Internet worldwide (Computer Industry Almanac, 2004). At the same time:

On any given day, there are approximately 225 major incidences of security breach reported to the CERT Coordination Center at Carnegie Mellon University.^[10]

In 2003, the number of CERT reported incidences jumped to 137,529 from 82,094 in 2002 and from 52,658 in 2001.^[11]
The worldwide economic impact of the three most dangerous Internet Viruses of the last three years was estimated at US$13.2 Billion.^[12]

Computer security has become a quantifiable and justifiable expense for all IT budgets. Organizations that require data integrity and high availability elicit the skills of system administrators, developers, and engineers to ensure 24x7 reliability of their systems, services, and information. Falling victim to malicious users, processes, or coordinated attacks is a direct threat to the success of the organization.

Unfortunately, system and network security can be a difficult proposition, requiring an intricate knowledge of how an organization regards, uses, manipulates, and transmits its information. Understanding the way an organization (and the people that make up the organization) conducts business is paramount to implementing a proper security plan.

Standardizing Security

Enterprises in every industry rely on regulations and rules that are set by standards making bodies such as the American Medical Association (AMA) or the Institute of Electrical and Electronics Engineers (IEEE). The same ideals hold true for information security. Many security consultants and vendors agree upon the standard security model known as CIA, or Confidentiality, Integrity, and Availability. This three-tiered model is a generally accepted component to assessing risks of sensitive information and establishing security policy. The following describes the CIA model in further detail:

Confidentiality - Sensitive information must be available only to a set of pre-defined individuals. Unauthorized transmission and usage of information should be restricted. For example, confidentiality of information ensures that a customer's personal or financial information is not obtained by an unauthorized individual for malicious purposes such as identity theft or credit fraud.

Integrity - Information should not be altered in ways that render it incomplete or incorrect. Unauthorized users should be restricted from the ability to modify or destroy sensitive information.
Availability - Information should be accessible to authorized users any time that it is needed. Availability is a warranty that information can be obtained with an agreed-upon frequency and timeliness. This is often measured in terms of percentages and agreed to formally in Service Level Agreements (SLAs) used by network service providers and their enterprise clients.