Computer Security: Computer security threats, vulnerabilities and attacks (3/4)

Antonio Perez Perez works in the Computer Security Team doing software development, sysadmin tasks and operations. He is also involved on grid security and does 1st line security support at CERN on ROTA. With the prevalence of modern information technologies and its increasing integration into our daily live, digital systems become more and more playground for evil people. While in the past, attacks were driven by fame& kudos, nowadays money is the motivating factor. Just the recent months have shown several successful attacks against e.g. Sony, PBS, UNESCO, RSAsecurity, Citibank, and others. Credit card information of hundreds of thousands of people got exposed. Affected companies not only lost their assets and data, also their reputation has suffered. Thus, proper computer security measures are essential. Without question, security must even more become an inherent ingredient when developing, deploying, and operating applications, web sites, and computing services. These lectures shall give an overview of general computer and information security, subsequently focus on the problems of creating secure applications and computer services, highlight the importance of security operations (i.e. prevention, protection, detection and response), delve into the specifies of securing the critical infrastructure and their digital control systems as well as securing cloud and distributed computing, and discuss the impact of so-called Web 2.0 technologies to security and privacy