Types of Cyber Threats

Abstract

Now day’s the global technology environment is continuing on changing. IT Companies are acquiring other companies or merging together, creating partnerships and diversity, and refocusing themselves. One of the main aspects emerging from this is the rising concern and importance of information resources and security. Companies have acknowledged computer viruses as a threat to productivity, but there is a range of other frightening cyber crimes that can impact a firm in different ways. This case study presents the key issue behind increasing awareness of information security and Visa transactions with and summarizes better NOS for threats facing the company, outlining and highlighting the key elements of an effective security system.

Types of cyber threats

Cyber crimes come in a different forms, such as a simple virus attached to an email, or

more complicated attacks. These threats target specific companies, while the consequences of the attack cause emails and in-box to loss advantage due to theft of confidential data. Common threats include the following:

Viruses, worms, and Trojan horses.

(DoS) Denial-of-Service. According to Wikipedia it is “an attempt to make a computer resource unavailable to its intended users.” (Wikipedia, 2006)

Hacking the network

Current and previous employee’s threat. Such using old passwords and users names.

AVAILABLE SOLUTIONS

Firewalls

(VPNs) Virtual Private Networks

Antivirus/filtering Software

(IDS) Intrusion Detection Systems

Visa Credit Card Processing-Case Study

Our company is having a big impact on the way the business is conducted. In today’s world’s era of technology, companies have a potential for risks more than ever; therefore, security concerns are increasing. This case study provides to us that enterprise strong security that can be easy to implement.

Samba is a networking operating system that could be used for Visa International interface with member banks, which it provides security for Visa transactions, and support database transactions. The dilemma is how a credit card companies and commerce businesses should provide a good security for transactions and better support database transactions. This is the key issue in the argument, since security is a serious concern in the E-commerce world.

The Challenge

The continual migration of data from one platform to another cost so much money for all companies. A good example would be the banking industry, since most of these companies have tremendous amount of databases about their customer information and transactions history stored in IBM 3x mainframes with COBOL. It is impossible to migrate this information to new platforms with error-free, and without a concern for the data integrity. This is without mentioning the hardware updates and its cost.

For these reasons Linux and Open Source technologies play an important role in the E-commerce and credit cards transactions enterprise, such as the Samba. Articles showed that some users were skeptical about free software, but now day’s big companies, such as IBM and Sun are the leading in the Open Source technologies. Free Linux was developed and supported by so many programmers all over the world, and integrating Linux with other technologies will be easier, cheaper, and faster for development and release. Now, in our company the Visa International and for the women’s clothing brick or mortar retailer, the network and database administrators will face an issue of security and old technologies if they do not provide security for credits transactions and reliable support for the database transactions. In the corporate backbone we have in our case an AS/400 that was migrated from a System 36, with all the design and financial applications running on the AS/400. Well, the AS/400 is also known as Applications Systems, and now System i, is a minicomputer produced by IBM. Further, added to it the POWER5 that changed the support for a better memory controller and with CPU supports 2 threads,