Network Security and Business

Company X is reputed to be the world's leading manufacturer and supplier of sportswear (sports shoes and vestments) and sports equipments with its headquarters situated in Oregon, Portland metropolitan area. The company presently accrued 16 billion US dollar worth excess revenue in 2007 only. In the year 2008, that company is credited to have recruited 30,000 employees globally, while at the same time maintaining its status as the sole grand crown holder of the Fortune 500 title as far the state of Oregon is concerned. In this essay, the vulnerabilities experienced by the company shall be looked at in respect to network security which entails working towards the protection of information that is passed o0r stored through or within the computer.

The company was founded in 1964 and then later re branded in 1978. The company is so well established that it does not only sell its products under its own company name, but it also does so through its subsidiaries. In addition to this, company X also owns other sports companies. In an effort to realize expansion, company X extended its services to run retail stores under its name. As a result of this, the company X has approximately 19,000 retail departments in the US alone. In the same vein, the company sells its products to about 140 countries globally.

The company has been traditionally sponsoring sportsmen and women around the globe and has very distinct logo and slogans. The slogans used by this company unlike those of the fellow competitors, made it to the top five slogans of the 20th century, and was accredited for this by the Smithsonian Institution. In 1980, company X had hit the 50% market share mark in the the United States, being only 16 years old. The most recent type of inventions by this company involves the production of new models of cricket shoes which in comparison to their competitors, are 30% lighter (Bernstein, 1996).

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The company seeks to maintain its vibrant market and maintains its upper hand against its competitors by producing products that are appealing to the tastes of the materialistic youth. The sports wear company produces and sells assortments used in sundry and diverse world of sports sch as basket ball, athletics, golf, American football (rugby), tennis, wrestling, skating, football and skate boarding, among others.

The company X having become a global entity, also faces many problems that come with expansionism. The troubles touch on cases of workers' rights in relation to the occupation safety and health matters. These cases are more distributed in the developing economies than in developed ones.

Conversely, there are also issues about social responsibility that border on the environmental safety in relation to the production processes and wastes produced by the company. The problem also stretches to its outsourcing vendors, who together with the company have been challenged by critics to work towards carbon neutrality.

Critics have also dismissed as lies the claim by the company that it increased the salary scale of its workers by 95%. These critics posit that the company seeks to always exploit its workers, of whom 58% are young adults aged between 22- 24 years, while 83% of the workers are women. Half of these workers in these companies are said  to have gone through their high school educational programs.  Because few of these people have work related skills, critics maintain, the subsidiaries of company X are reported to be using this state of affairs to exploit their employees by issuing them very minimal wages (Mc Nab, 2004).

Again, it is reported that out of company X's contract factories, 20% deal in the casual production of of the products. These factories are always bedeviled by cases of harassment and abuse (of which the company has moved in to sort out the situation by liaising with the Global Alliance in order to review the first twenty one of the most notorious factories. The company also set up the prescribed code of conduct so as to inculcate social responsibility among the workers.

Spates of continual human rights abuse nevertheless continued to persist. In Indonesia for example, 30.2% of the workers of company X are reported to have been victims of exploitation. 56% of these workers are said to have undergone verbal abuse. In about the same spectrum, 7.8% are reported to have succumbed to unwanted sexual comments, while 3.3% are said to have been abused physically. In Pakistan, the matter deteriorated to cases of child abuse and the conscription of child labor. For instance, in the same country, the issue came to the global attention when pictures were displayed, portraying children knitting football which were to be then sold by this company.

Another matter that haunts this company X is the protection of information, or commonly called by the corporate world and the computer science and management as network security. Of recent developments, concerns over privacy have soared, and become subject to public furore and debates when it was found out by security experts after conducting a research in the University of Washington, that company X's iPod sport kit had the ability to track people . Initially, the surveillance system that works through the company's iPod sports kit had been designed to allow the user (mainly the sports person) of this facility to take note of the calories that have been burned, the speed, the distance covered and the time dispensed when undertaking sports activities.

The kit was fitted with a transmitter that was designed to be stuck on the shoes and the iPod's transmitter. The tracking is made possible by the fact that the transmitter relays particular ID. Although the problem first seemed minuscule due to the fact that the information could only be accessed from a 60 feet away shoe, yet it was found out later that more problems, it seemed would set in since the surveillance or tracking system was then fed to the Google maps (Sloot, 2003).

In order to bring in ameliorations in this matter, comprehensive laws are being proposed so that company X and its counterparts who use these systems can be forced to beef up security into the models- a measure which these companies are ignoring. Some related speculations are also rife that the company's retailing contractors  are using the RFID tags for tracking their consignments and keeping track of the stock market. This problem is hydra headed since apart from the obvious fact that this may scare away potential customers, it still has exposed the company to anti company X campaigns which have widely been  activated and managed by the Caspian organization in the US.

Customers will shy away from the products since the communication system of the company X seems to have been compromised in its CIA (confidentiality, integrity and availability) of information security. Confidentiality portends that only the permitted authorities access information, while integrity ensures that information stays only within the precincts of the authorized handlers. Availability on the other hand demands that those who are authorized access information are be able to so do efficiently and quickly. The external leaking in and out of confidential information can be very costly and should always be avoided

Company X is working out to ameliorate this problem. On 5th March 2008, in Oregon, it held a meeting in which the departmental heads and subsidiary representatives met, and analyzed the extent of the vulnerability (they had already come into the board meeting, having known the nature, and the extent of the risk). As an immediate contingency, company X decided that it was going to suspend the sale of the iPod transmitters as a measure to instill risk avoidance.

Having also become aware that there was also the danger of information systems being invaded by hackers, (as was seen in the 31st July, 2007 when in Pakistan tens of its computers succumbed), consensus was arrived at that all computer systems in the organizations adopt the man- in- between technique by adopting the firewall computer security system that will be able to detect the nature of the on coming information.

On another front, the company X agreed that it was to globally look at its wireless networking: the technology that the supports the connectivity of each computer to a specific network or networks. This does not portend coming up with a new system of networking, but bolstering the configurations and the security systems. New and stronger RAMs( Random Access Memory ) were bought and have already been set in place.  This will ensure that the roiter system within the company's area of jurisdictions are very strong and very fast in detecting anomalies (Raquet and Saxe, 2005).

The computer technicians in company X suggested that the leaking of the company's secret information could be due to the fact that the computer connectivity in Pakistan could have been in the open mode configuration. These technicians elaborated that open computer mode connectivity allows anyone even without the building to access information from an open mode configured computer. The situations becomes more vulnerable in the present day due to the portability of the computers (laptops and palm tops).

Open mode wireless computers have a preset name that makes the computer to, on being turned on, start broadcasting packets which prompt all wireless devices within the precincts about the availability of connectivity (Albanese and Sonnenreich, 2003). However, should the computers be switched on to closed configuration, the beacon packets are no longer broadcasted by the access point.

It was also discovered that although the headquarters were already filtered, yet not all of the subsidiaries were. It is an this backdrop that the computer technicians under the aegis of the company's information and technology department recommended that the Wireless Encryption Protocol (WEP)  be introduced to ward off even the most sophisticated hackers. Wireless Encryption Protocol ensure that the data that is being relayed is not in the readable format, but instead, it becomes only readable after being decoded in a backward manner on being received. This leaves the data unreadable on being captured in between transition since the data is still encoded. The hacker is frustrated unless in possession of the knowledge about the  original address.

Conclusion

As a concept, network security is very important in the realization of a company's secret information. Good and comprehensive network security keeps secret information from flowing outwards to unwanted parties, while at the same time, enabling efficient flow of information within an enterprise. The systems of communication ( the hardware, the software and the orgware ) is also adequately protected.

Company X would accrue higher returns if it enhanced all of its network security systems within its disposal.

References

1. Albanese, J. and Sonnenreich, W. (2003). Illustrations on network security. US: Mc Graw Hill.
2. Bernstein, T. (1996). Internet security designed for business. US: Wiley.
3. Mc Nab, C. (2004). Assessment of network security. US: O' Rielley.
4. Raquet, C. and Saxe, W. (2005). Advocacy and governance of business network security. US: Cisco Press.
5. Sloot, P. (2003). International conference of computational science.

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