COMPUTER SECURITY

Computer Security

Executive Summary

Administration command of the computers that employees use in the company is a topic that is in a state of transition. For example, only 20 per hundred of Fortune's 1000 businesses and six of the government bureaus now use supervising programs to watch over their agency computers, according to a latest survey undertook by the American Management Association (Edwards, 1999). With the continual impel for productivity increases in the area of white-collar work, this number is anticipated to boost over the approaching years. The topic becomes the privacy rights of the workers versus the privileges of employers to improve productivity, bypass legal problems, such as leaking business secrets, sending racist messages, or harassing by the computer.

Computer Security

Introduction and declaration of Problem

A latest survey by Nielsen/Net rankings disclosed that Americans spend an mean of 21 hours online at work each month - more than two times the allowance they did at home - partly because their employers suggested much quicker attachments (Stoughton, 2000). She supplemented that “most of the top 10 World Wide Web sites accessed from the office apparently had not anything to do with work … By far, the most popular site both at home and at work was eBay, an auction location offering everything from Beanie offspring to limousines” (Stoughton, 2000). In supplement, other sites being accessed at work were MyFamily.com and RootsWeb. This has certainly become a time-consuming disruption at work that desires to be controlled. And, really, some companies are monitoring their workers mouse clicks. For example, Xerox Corporation of Stamford, Connecticut, looked over the workers' bears and discovered that some employees were selling stocks, leering at nudes, and wagering on line. They discharged 40 workers, (Stoughton, 2000).

One intriguing state bill the administrator of California vetoed would have needed businesses in California to notify workers each time they were being supervised, thus scoring a in addition to in California for companies (Edwards, 1999). However, the battle may not be over in California since many senators in California believe workers' privileges are being violated by this unannounced monitoring. farther, in a new risk to individual privacy on the job, McCarthy described that some companies have started to use surveillance programs that covertly monitors and notes each keystroke an employee makes: every note, every comma, every revision, every flick of the fingertip, despite of whether the data is ever kept in a file or conveyed over a corporate computer mesh. McCarthy refers to this as giving “employers get access to workers' unvarnished thoughts - and the potential to use that information for their own finishes” (McCarthy, 2000).

This study determined where chosen industries in the south are at this time in their command of employees' use of company computers and e-mail anecdotes and the methods and procedures utilized to secure data. The facts and figures were assembled via a questionnaire mailed to 209 company computer information managers in some south states.

Review of the literature

Watson (1997) asserted that while more and more companies are taking benefit of e-mail, ...