CHAPTER 6

A. Listed below are five different scenarios. Read the scenario thoroughly and answer the following questions.

Required:

i. For each scenario, discuss the potential consequences and give a prevention technique available.

a. The systems operator opened a bag of burned microwave popcorn directly under a smoke detector in the computing room where two mainframes, three highspeed printers, and approximately 40 tapes are housed. The extremely sensitive smoke detector triggered the sprinkler system. Three minutes passed before the sprinklers could be turned off.

b. A system programmer intentionally placed an error into a program that causes the operating system to fail and dump certain confidential information to disks and printers.

c. Jane's employer told her she would be laid off in 3 weeks. After 2 weeks, Jane realized that finding another secretarial job was going to be very tough. She decided to resign. Her son told her about a virus that had infected his school's computer and that one of his disks had been infected. Jane took the infected disk to work and copied it onto the network server, which is connected to the company's mainframe. One month later, the company realized that some data and application programs had been destroyed.

d. Robert discovered a new sensitivity analysis public-domain program on the Internet. He downloaded the software to hiss microcomputer at home, then took the application to work and placed it onto his networked personal computer. The program had a virus on it that eventually spread to the company's mainframe.

e. Murali, a trusted employee and a systems engineer, had access to both the computer access control list and user passwords. The firm's competitor recently hired him for twice his salary. After leaving, Murali continued to browse through his old employer's data, such as price list, bids on jobs, and so on. He passed this information on to his new employer.