Research Paper. Evaluating Cyber Security and Risk Management

Evaluating Cyber Security and Risk Management
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Background
Technology can be considered as a discovery and use of the wheel of the century. This is relative to the impact that it has had on the society. More importantly, this is an innovation that has impacted almost all areas of the economy, social and even cultural processes. Over the years, technology has brought about innovations that make life much easier at every level of interaction. Whether using technology for communication, transportation, and even production among others, the impacts are subtle. One of the areas where technology has enhanced with subtle applications in almost all areas of the economy and social interactions is through the development of computers. These are systems that have virtually taken on over the entire economy (Galinec, Možnik & Guberina, 2017). The use of a computer while may be taken for granted by many is a subtle application and one that makes an immense number of operations swift and efficient. However, there are risks associated with the use of computers in virtually all areas of production; these are in the form of malicious programs. Hackers in the black hat lane understand the impact that computers have on the economy. Using computer programs that are designed with malicious intents, they can take charge of the computer resources and more importantly access information on databases for profit or malice. There is a variety of malicious programs that are used to attack computers at various levels (Sharkasi, 2015). There are those that are targeted at personal computers, organizational computers, organizational networks, government servers and networks among others. In all of these systems, there are various levels of attacks and programs that are used to access the information on them and resources. The means of attack largely depend on the nature of information or resources that the hackers want to gain access to. More important, the level of information and resource sensitivity also determines the level of sophistication of the programs (Galinec, Možnik & Guberina, 2017). Over the years, hackers have also evolved with the level of security features that have been introduced on the computer systems. The average personal computer will have a firewall and an antivirus program running in the background. While in the past the malicious programs majored in disrupting processes on the computers and the network systems, they have since evolved to gaining root access and controlling resources on systems along with accessing information. By taking control of a server system of a subway system, the hackers can not only access sensitive information of the users but also gain control of the trains, their schedules and even physical control of the trains, about acceleration, routes, braking and lighting among others. Some of the most important malicious programs which are of focus in this paper are the Rootkits. These are malware programs that take on administrative control of the computer without the consent of the user. In most cases, they are bundled with software such that, where a user downloads a program and run it on their system, the rootkit also installs in t...