Efficient Software Protection
Updating Software
Updating a software designed to protect information is vital to avoid cyber-attacks. It is easy to compare software development with medicine. For example, when a person is sick to kill the virus doctors give antibiotics to the person. With time and constant usage of antibiotics viruses and bacteria get used to fight the antibiotics. Therefore, scientist constantly have to change the chemicals used on antibiotics, so antibiotics are strong enough to fight the virus or bacteria. The same happens with software. At the same time that software developers are creating software, hackers develop viruses to break into the software to still or delete the information it contains. The best way to avoid a hacker breaks in to a software is updating its main code constantly, at least more than twice a year.
Requesting Personal Information
Many people often ask: Why do I have to give personal information to a software? The reason why security softwares need these kind of information is because it uses that personal information to verify the user’s credentials. In other words, it uses the information to know if the user is authorized to access the information the software is protecting and to know if the user can modify the configurations already set at the moment of installation.
Ethics
This part is very important when it comes to install new software. Something very important that people need to know is that every time that they install new software their computers are vulnerable. To avoid be hacked by someone it’s important that people read the terms and conditions of the software they are installing. Hackers take advantage that users don’t read terms and conditions to steel information from their computer.
References
Berger, J. L., Picciotto, J., Woodward, J. P. L., & Cummings, P. T. (1990). Compartmented mode workstation: Prototype highlights. IEEE Transactions on Software Engineering, 16(6), 608-618. Retrieved from: http://ieeexplore.ieee.org/document/55089/?anchor=authors
Clark, D. D., & Wilson, D. R. (1987, April). A comparison of commercial and military computer security policies. In Security and Privacy, 1987 IEEE Symposium on (pp. 184-184). IEEE.
Ioannidis, S., & Bellovin, S. M. (2001, June). Building a Secure Web Browser. In USENIX Annual Technical Conference, FREENIX Track (pp. 127-134).
Sturges, P. (2009). Information ethics in the twenty first century. Australian Academic & Research Libraries, 40(4), 241-251.
Introna, L. D. (2007). Maintaining the reversibility of foldings: Making the ethics (politics) of information technology visible. Ethics and Information Technology, 9(1), 11-25.
