Project description:
Assignment Brief: Data Security
Background:
Data and Information Security has become a major issue for everyone. Individuals, organisations and businesses are increasingly becoming targets for ever more complex attacks. The timescale for knowing about and dealing with potential security weaknesses can often be measured in hours and this puts huge pressure on the IT professionals responsible for maintaining the system. In recent times we have seen attack vectors ranging from ‘phishing’ attacks aimed at vulnerable individuals to major cyber-war attacks orchestrated possibly by nation states.
There is no formula or strategy that can be adopted that offers any guarantees when dealing with security and so the individual IT technician or manager must be pro-active in the day-to- day business of handling potential threats. Much of this approach is about communication. It is about informing people at all levels in an organisation what they must do to contribute to a more secure system.
This assignment is all about these two things, namely, being pro-active in searching out information on current security threats, and then getting that information into a form that a wide range of IT professionals in your organisation or business can absorb easily and quickly.
Remember, if a summary can’t be read and understood in the time it takes to drink a cup of coffee- then it’ll go in the bin!
Data Security:
Assignment Brief:
The Task:
The Portfolio:
You are to compile a dossier of technical summaries on current security issues. Each week, a technical summary of around 300 words will be written on one of the topics that is currently of concern in the security world. (Note: I may support this process with regular News Podcasts of a number of current security issues for the previous week. These may be delivered to you via your email account, which you should be checking daily, or accessed via the university VLE. If for any reason the weekly podcast is not available, you should research your own topic for that week. Each week you should attempt to research suitable evidence (e.g. web pages, reports and security notifications) for one security issue that you consider important (usually selected from my news podcasts) and use this researched eveidence to support your summary. You must use your initiative and common sense in researching each weekly issue and attempt to gain some insight into what the technical issues are that underpins the vulnerability. The weekly summaries (300 words each) of your chosen issues will constitute a 3,000 word submission in total. Do not leave this aspect of the assignment. Do your research and summary each week! Therefore, in summary, you will construct each week, the following, One 300 word (+/- 10%) word technical summary of one security topic that you consider important (usually selected from my weekly podcast). Plus printouts of the researched web pages that you used in support of the written summary.
By the end of teaching week 10, you should have a dossier of 10 of these security summaries.
Your summaries should be written in your own words except where referenced quotations are used and be written in a style that makes the topic accessible to staff who are not security specialists, but who do have a good grasp of computing and networking. This is a very important aspect of the assignment and can heavily influence the final mark you get. Consider how to present your technical summaries in a way that captures the interest of your targeted readership.