The Pros And Cons Of Information Security

What is Information Security and why it is Important?

Information security refers to “the process and methodologies that are designed and implemented to protect print, electronic, or any other form of confidential, private and sensitive information or data from unauthorized access, use, misuse, disclosure, destruction, modification, or disruption” (SANS Institute, n.d.). Information security programs are important in maintaining confidentiality, integrity, and availability (figure 1 page X). For example, a Trojan horse was planted on your system and result in the loss of customers’ personal and financial information. This failure to protect data will result in a loss, legal liability, and goodwill. In this scenario, both confidentiality and

Confidentiality referred to:

“The treatment of information that an individual has disclosed in a relationship of trust and with the expectation that it will not be divulged to others without permission in ways that are inconsistent with the understanding of the original disclosure” (University of California, Irvine, n.d.).

Therefore, measures must be in place to prevent data breach as confidential information stored on computers has increased with time.

The objective of this paper is to look at the pros and cons of privacy breaches caused by human errors and hacking. The purpose of this research paper is to prove that human error is the leading cause of breaches by looking at areas where the violation occurs. Those areas included but not limited to:

1. Loss of administrative credentials

2. Employee negligence

3. Third party access

Types of

As a result, there are many guidelines and regulations in place to help avoid data breaches. However, the Office of Privacy Commissioner of Canada says that reporting of a violation is not mandatory, so the number is not an accurate representation of data breach in Canada (see table 1). While hacking is the most reported form of a data breach, there are plenty of other factors such as human errors, system glitches, and malicious that affect information security that goes unreported or are less abrasive.

Information Security: Human Errors vs. Hackers

As mentioned before, the focus of this paper is to compare and contrast human error and hacking. Hacking can be defined as exploitations to weaken a computer systems. Thus, creating a breach in information security and is done for many reasons mainly for financial gains and to exposed hiding agenda whereas human error occurs as a result of one of the following reasons: loss of administrative credentials, employee negligence, and third party access just to name a few.

Loss of Administrative