When Arthur Andersen partner David Duncan met with his colleagues in their Houston office last fall, just before the onset of their now infamous computer file delete-fest, they did not couch their planned mission as a purposeful endeavor to destroy evidence relevant to an impending Securities and Exchange Commission (SEC) investigation.
The September 11 attacks on the World Trade Center illustrate that in a free market economy, attacks against privately owned facilities can be even more damaging than those against government targets such as the Pentagon.
U.S. Vice President Dick Cheney was recently on NBC’s Meet the Press where he said that the inevitability of another terrorist attack on American soil is as sure today as it was September 12.
Frequently, the media characterizes computer crimes as those involving hacking (gaining unauthorized computer network access), cracking (another word for gaining unauthorized access to a computer or program), or web page defacing (gaining unauthorized access to a web page and changing its content).
In his last column [www.infosecnews.com/opinion/2002/05/15_04.htm], Bill Van Emburg discussed the urgent requirement for companies to address the privacy of their customers’ data.