Question

M11 Discussion - Data Security

Data security is a concern every day for information technology professionals. Users, even information technology professionals move data from point to point on a regular basis and often this requires some form of mobility. For this discussion, please address the points listed below. If you use web sources, include the complete URL to the article.

• Think about your normal day. Describe how you use your smartphone, table, or laptop away from your home or office.
• Now, refect on the possible areas in which your data could be breached, reviewed, copied, or stolen.
• If you were an information technology professional, what are some of the things you would do to help prevent such data breaches?

Each student will be responsible for responding to the discussion question by Wednesday with a word count of at least 250 words.

Answer 1

PRIVACY has become a big question in today’s internet world. Recent surveys say that more than 80% of the user’s searches have been captured and made use of it to improve the business and strategies. If I search for something in search engines, I keep getting advertisements, pop-ups in external applications installed on my mobile phone. How do other applications know what I searched for in some other search engine? Is everything interconnected and interlinked? These questions will come up in the mind.

The website keeps tracks of user's interests for business decision making. It keeps the track of what items you search, the price range, the brand and so on. Once it gets all the necessary history details, it tries to provide suggestions to the user.

On the background there are many algorithms are running which are processing your inputs and providing smart suggestions. These techniques are AI based. AI stands for Artificial Intelligence. It is one of the widely used techniques for making intelligent decisions which simulate human behavior in solving complex problems.

You would have seen when you purchase a mobile phone, you would have got suggestion stating to buy phone cover along with the phone with the tag 'People bought these items together' which is a data mining task. The browser or website history have enough information for the algorithms to perform classification of tasks. It is known as supervised learning technique in Machine Learning. The system understands your searching information and provides more accurate suggestions through Natural Language Processing and so on so forth.

The server or browser keeps track of this information and get it supplied as an input to AI algorithms for business decision making. How does my mobile application provides pop advertising know that you have been searching for the specific item?

There are different areas where our data breached based on the above situations. It can be from a website where we search queries, fill forms, submit it. It can be from malicious apps which we are not aware of in our smartphone.

If you were an information technology professional, what are some of the things you would do to help prevent such data breaches?
- Do not click suspicious links within the home network (Ex. HTTP, foreign/irrelevant website)
- Identify phishing websites
- Strengthen protocol security
- Update the systems regularly
- Incorporate high standard security mechanisms
- Protect the data
- Maintain the confidentiality
- Validate the data before sending to avoid SQL injection based attacks
- Do not grant unnecessary permissions to android applications