Information Technology for Managers

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Information Technology for Managers

• Chapter 12
• Ethical, Privacy, and Security Issues

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Objectives

• What are some of the ethical issues raised by the
  use of information technology?
• What privacy issues are raised by the use of
  information technology, and how do organizations
  deal with them?
• What are some common information technology
  security issues, and how can organizations
  minimize their potential negative impact?

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What is Ethics?

• Ethics
• Set of beliefs about right and wrong behavior
• Ethical behavior
• Conforms to generally accepted social norms
• Doing what is ethical can be difficult

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Improving Corporate Ethics

• Unethical behavior has led to serious negative
  consequences that have had a global impact
• Failure of major corporations like Enron and
  WorldCom due to accounting scandals
• Collapse of many financial institutions due to
  unwise and unethical decision making
• Organizations today recognize the need to take
  action to ensure that their employees operate in
  an ethical manner when using technology

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Appointing a Corporate Ethics Officer

• Corporate ethics
• Includes ethical conduct, legal compliance, and
  corporate social responsibility
• Corporate ethics officer
• Senior-level manager
• Provides vision and direction in the area of
  business conduct
• Corporation will place a higher emphasis on
  ethics policies following a major scandal within
  the organization

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Ethical Standards Set by Board of Directors

• Board of directors
• Responsible for supervising the management team
• Expected to conduct themselves according to the
  highest standards of personal and professional
  integrity
• Set the standard for company-wide ethical conduct
  and ensure compliance with laws and regulations

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Establishing a Corporate Code of Ethics

• Code of ethics
• Highlights an organizations key ethical issues
• Identifies the overarching values and principles
  that are important to the organization
• Formal, written statements about
• Purpose of the organization
• Values
• Principles that guide its employees actions
• Develop with employee participation
• Fully endorsed by the organizations leadership

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Establishing a Corporate Code of Ethics
(continued)
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Requiring Employees to Take Ethics Training

• Companys code of ethics must be promoted and
  continually communicated within the organization
• From top to bottom
• Comprehensive ethics education program
• Small workshop formats
• Existence of formal training programs
• Can reduce a companys liability in the event of
  legal action

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Including Ethical Criteria in Employee Appraisals

• Employees evaluated on their demonstration of
  qualities and characteristics highlighted in the
  corporate code of ethics
• Considered along with more traditional criteria
  used in performance appraisals

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Privacy

• Balance the needs of those who use the
  information against the rights and desires of the
  people whose information may be used
• Various states have passed laws that require
  disclosure of any breach of security to any
  resident whose data is believed to have been
  compromised

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Privacy (continued)
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Right to Privacy

• Historical perspective on the right to privacy
• Protected by a number of amendments in the Bill
  of Rights

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Treating Customer Data Responsibly

• Code of Fair Information Practices and the 1980
  Organization for Economic Cooperation and
  Development (OECD) privacy guidelines
• Five widely accepted core principles
• European adequacy standard for privacy protection
• United States does not meet these standards
• Organizations should appoint an executive
• Chief Privacy Officer, or CPO
• Define, implement, and oversee data privacy
  policies

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Treating Customer Data Responsibly (continued)

• Establish an effective data privacy program
• Conduct a thorough assessment
• Define a comprehensive data privacy program
• Assign a high-level executive
• Develop a data breach response plan
• Track ongoing changes to regulatory and legal
  requirements

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Workplace Monitoring

• IT usage policy
• Establishes boundaries of acceptable behavior
• Enables management to take action against
  violators
• Organizations monitor workers to ensure compliance

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Workplace Monitoring (continued)
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Workplace Monitoring (continued)

• Fourth Amendment of the Constitution
• Protects citizens from unreasonable searches by
  the government
• Often used to protect the privacy of government
  employees
• Cannot be used to control how a private employer
  treats its employees
• Public sector employees have far greater privacy
  rights than those in private industry
• State privacy statutes tend to favor employers
  over employees

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A Manager Takes Inappropriate Action City of
Ontario, California

• Contracted with Arch Wireless to provide wireless
  text-messaging Services
• Jeff Quon, a member of the Ontario Police
  Department (OPD) SWAT team
• Received alphanumeric pager
• Sent sexually explicit messages to two other
  workers in the police department and to his wife
• General computer usage, Internet, and e-mail
  policy
• Not specific to pagers

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A Manager Takes Inappropriate Action City of
Ontario, California (continued)

• Ontario Police Department was unable to access
  the message directly
• Requested that Arch Wireless provide the
  transcripts
• Stored Communications Act (SCA)
• Attempt to address a number of potential privacy
  issues not addressed by the Fourth Amendment
• U.S. Court of Appeals for the Ninth Circuit
• Ruled that Arch Wireless was an electronic
  communications service and had violated the SCA
  when it provided transcripts of Quons messages
  to the OPD

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Cybercrime and Computer Security

• Cybercrime
• Criminal activity in which a computer or a
  computer network is used as a tool to commit a
  crime or is the target of criminal activity
• Electronic fraud
• Class of cybercrime
• Involves the use of computer hardware, software,
  or networks to misrepresent facts for the purpose
  of causing someone to do or refrain from doing
  something that causes loss

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Types of Attacks

• Attack on a networked computer from an outside
  source
• One of the most frequent types of attack
• Viruses
• Piece of programming code
• Usually disguised as something innocuous
• Cause some unexpected and undesirable event
• Often attached to a file
• Do not spread themselves from computer to
  computer
• Macro viruses

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Types of Attacks (continued)

• Worms
• Harmful computer programs that reside in the
  active memory of the computer
• Can propagate over a network without human
  intervention
• May install malware (malicious software) on a
  computer

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Types of Attacks (continued)

• Distributed Denial-of-Service Attack (DDOS)
• Malicious hacker takes over computers connected
  to the Internet
• Causes them to flood a target site with demands
  for data and other small tasks
• Zombie
• Compromised computer
• Botnet
• Group of zombie computers running software that
  is being remotely controlled without the
  knowledge or consent of the owners

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Types of Attacks (continued)

• DDOS (continued)
• Spoofing
• Zombies are often programmed to put false return
  addresses on the packets they send out
• Egress filtering
• Ensure that spoofed packets do not leave their
  corporate network

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Perpetrators
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Defensive Measures

• Risk assessment
• Organizations review of potential threats to its
  computers and networks
• Identify which investments of time and resources
  will best protect the organization from its most
  likely and serious threats
• Reasonable assurance
• Managers must use their judgment to ensure that
  the cost of control does not exceed the systems
  benefits or the risks involved

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Establishing a Security Policy

• Security policy
• Defines an organizations security requirements
• Defines controls and sanctions needed to meet
  those requirements
• National Institute of Standards and Technology
  (NIST)
• Computer Security Division
• Automated system rules should mirror an
  organizations written policies

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Establishing a Security Policy (continued)

• E-mail attachments
• Critical security issue
• Virtual private network (VPN)
• Uses the Internet to relay communications
• Maintains privacy through security procedures and
  tunneling protocols

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Educating Employees, Contractors, and Part-Time
Workers

• Must be educated about the importance of security
• Discuss recent security incidents
• Protect an organizations information systems and
  data by
• Guarding their passwords
• Applying strict access controls
• Reporting all unusual activity to the
  organizations IT security group

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Prevention

• Installing a corporate firewall
• Established through the use of software,
  hardware, or a combination of both
• Can lead to complacency
• Intrusion prevention systems
• Prevent an attack by blocking viruses, malformed
  packets, and other threats from getting into the
  company network

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Prevention (continued)

• Installing antivirus software on personal
  computers
• Virus signature
• Specific sequence of bytes
• United States Computer Emergency Response Team
  (US-CERT)
• Most of the virus and worm attacks that the team
  analyzes use already known programs
• Crucial that antivirus software be updated
  continually with the latest virus detection
  information

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Prevention (continued)

• Implementing safeguards against attacks by
  malicious insiders
• IT staff must delete the computer accounts, login
  IDs, and passwords of departing employees
• Create roles and user accounts so that users have
  the authority to perform their responsibilities
  and no more

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Prevention (continued)

• Addressing the most critical Internet security
  threats
• Overwhelming majority of successful computer
  attacks are made possible by taking advantage of
  well-known vulnerabilities
• SANS (System Administration, Networking, and
  Security) Institute and US-CERT regularly update
  a summary of the most frequent, high-impact
  vulnerabilities

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Prevention (continued)

• Conducting periodic IT security audits
• Evaluate whether an organization has a
  well-considered security policy in place and if
  it is being followed
• Test system safeguards
• Federal Computer Security Report Card

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Prevention (continued)
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Detection

• Intrusion detection system
• Software and/or hardware
• Monitors system and network resources and
  activities and notifies network security
  personnel when it identifies possible intrusions
• Different approaches to intrusion detection
• Knowledge-based approaches
• Behavior-based approaches

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Response

• Primary goal
• Regain control and limit damage
• Not to attempt to monitor or catch an intruder
• Incident notification
• Define who to notify and who not to notify
• Protecting evidence and activity logs
• Document all details of a security incident
• Incident containment
• Act quickly to contain an attack

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Response (continued)

• Eradication
• Collect and log all possible criminal evidence
  from the system
• Verify that all necessary backups are current
• Create a forensic disk image of each compromised
  system
• Keep a log of all actions taken

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Response (continued)

• Incident follow-up
• Determine how the organizations security was
  compromised
• Develop an estimate of the monetary damage
• Determine amount of effort that should be put
  into capturing the perpetrator

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Summary

• Ethics
• Set of beliefs about right and wrong behavior
• Treat customer data responsibly
• Information technology usage policy
• Laws governing employee privacy and monitoring
• Cybercrime
• Types of attacks
• Prevention
• Detection
• Response