Security in Computing 5th Edition by Shari Lawrence Pfleeger, Charles P Pfleeger, Jonathan Margulies

Exercise 3

Perform the analysis of Exercise for a personal computing system located in a large research laboratory.

Exercise

Identify the three most probable threats to a personal computing system in an office with fewer than ten employees. That is, identify the three vulnerabilities most likely to be exploited. Estimate the number of times each vulnerability is exploited per year; justify your estimate.

Step 1 of 3

Vulnerabilities to a personal computing system in a Research Laboratory

Vulnerability can be defined as the possible weaknesses found in the system which can lead to breaches of confidentiality, integrity, and availability of important data.

There are several techniques by which system vulnerabilities can be controlled. Vulnerabilities occur with the assets of the system. A single vulnerability can down upon one or more assets. Vulnerabilities can be of many forms; it can arise from disasters such as fire, power or system component failure, or from malicious attacks, intruder attacks, deletion of some important data, buffer overflow, and so on.