Natural and political disasters

Fires, floods, earthquakes, hurricanes, tornadoes, blizzards, wars, and terrorist attacks are just a few examples of natural and political catastrophes that can devastate an information system and bring down many businesses.

For example:

● Terrorist attacks on the World Trade Center in New York City and the Federal Building in Oklahoma City destroyed or disrupted all the systems in those buildings.

● A flood in Chicago destroyed or damaged 400 data processing centers. A flood in Des Moines, Iowa, buried the city’s computer systems under eight feet of water. Hurricanes and earthquakes have destroyed numerous computer systems and severed communication lines. Other systems were damaged by falling debris, water from ruptured sprinkler systems, and dust.

Software errors and equipment malfunctions

Software errors, operating system crashes, hardware failures, power outages and fluctuations,

and undetected data transmission errors constitute a second type of threat. A federal study estimated yearly economic losses due to software bugs at almost $60 billion. More than 60% of companies studied had significant software errors.

Examples of errors include:

● More than 50 million people in the Northeast were left without power when an industrial control system in part of the grid failed. Some areas were powerless for four days, and damages from the outage ran close to $10 billion.

● At Facebook, an automated system for verifying configuration value errors backfired, causing every single client to try to fix accurate data it perceived as invalid. Since the fix involved querying a cluster of databases, that cluster was quickly overwhelmed by hundreds of thousands of queries a second. The resultant crash took the Facebook system offline for two-and-a-half hours.

Unintentional Errors

Unintentional actions, such as accidents or benign mistakes and omissions, are the third category of hazard that poses the greatest risk to information systems and results in the highest monetary losses. According to the Computing Technology Industry Association, human error accounts for 80% of security issues. According to Forrester Research, employees unknowingly introduce legal, regulatory, or financial hazards in 25% of their outgoing emails.

Human carelessness, a disregard for accepted protocol, and improperly trained or supervised staff can contribute to unintentional acts. Users mistakenly delete or change files, data, and programs. They also lose or misplace data. computer users and operators enter incorrect Using the incorrect program version, incorrect data files or misplacing data files are all examples of improper or incorrect input. Systems analysts create systems that fail to satisfy business requirements, leaving them open to attack, or are unable to perform the tasks for which they were designed. Programmers err in logic.

For example;

● UPS lost a box of computer tapes containing sensitive information on 3.9 million

Citigroup customers.

● Jefferson County, West Virginia, released a new

INTERNATIONAL ACTS

A fourth threat is an intentional act such as a computer crime, fraud, or sabotage, which is

deliberate destruction or harm to a system. Information systems are increasingly vulnerable to

attacks. Examples of intentional acts include the following:

● The Sobig virus wreaked havoc on millions of computers, including shutting down train

systems for up to six hours.

● In Australia, a disgruntled employee hacked into a sewage system 46 times over two

months. Pumps failed, and a quarter of a million gallons of raw sewage poured into

nearby streams, flooding a hotel and park.

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