IT Security Threats and Countermeasures Research Paper

IT Security Threats and Countermeasures - Research Paper Example Alongside all the advantages of IT, there exists an appalling consequence that compels the organizations to invest hefty amounts- IT security threats. This paper shall discuss the most commonly witnessed IT security threats, along with the counter measures that are used to safeguard data and systems. 2. Overview Computer technology has evolved with the passage of the years. These incremental improvements have been coupled with the increasing spiteful activities in the world of technology. Intruders and hackers have gotten more technology savvy with the evolution of newer systems and technologies. Cyber crimes are increasing drastically every year even in the presence of effective security systems. â€Å"Computer crime reports increase 22 percent in 2009: Crime News-Crime Prevention† included figures from FBI Internet Crime Complaint Center’s 2009 report; the year 2009 faced 22% increase in cyber crimes as compared to the year of 2008. National Institute of Standards and Technology Administration defined IT security as the protection of an automated information system to ensure that the key attributes of the computing resources (hardware, software, data and telecommunications) are preserved, namely confidentiality, integrity and availability. The report explained these three attributes in the following manner: Confidentiality can be defined as a requirement that compels the owner or bearer of the information or computing resource to protect it from exposure to any third parties. Integrity can be defined as the requirement that compels the owner or bearer of the information or programs to protect it from being changed by any unauthorized entity. Availability can be defined as the requirement that compels the owner of the information or computing resource to ensure that the service is available to all the legitimate users at all times. 3. Threats to IT Security 3.1 Denial of Service (DoS) Attack Denial of service attacks are aimed to bombard a certai n server with excess number of requests to affect the availability of the server. A server is capable of granting requests to a certain number of users; the bombardment of requests from an unreliable host or multiple hosts makes the server incapable of servicing the legitimate users. McDowell stated that malicious intent users perform such spiteful activities to hinder the provision of service and likely to crash the systems with the overload of requests. Distributed denial of service attacks (DDoS) are initiated from multiple hosts, rather than the participation of a single host. 3.1.1 Repercussions of the Attack Roberts stated that the nation of Mynamar faced a massive denial of service attack in 2010 when their Ministry of Post and Telecommunication were attacked by denial of service. The investigation of the matter revealed that it was initiated from numerous sources thereby making it a distributed attack. It involved 10 to 15 Gbps of traffic to make the servers unavailable to l egitimate users. This type of attack threatens the availability of the systems and services. 3.1.2 Countermeasures CAPTCHAs technology was introduced in the world of computing numerous years back to avoid the menace of denial of service attacks. Ahn, Blum, Hopper and Langford stated that CAPTCHAs are defined as small graphical images which constitute of scrambled text. The text is scrambled in such a manner that a human can only identify the characters correctly, rather than automated