Getting the Adjustment Right: Controls and Computer Security Available to Purchase

As computers and information technology gradually insinuate themselves into every nook and cranny of business operations, management have begun to appreciate some of the risks as well as the benefits. But why are computer systems so vulnerable? There are many reasons why computer systems need to be protected. Computers are so much smaller and more powerful than they were just a few years ago and so much more extensively used as a consequence that the combination of their ubiquity and the importance of the information that they hold is a magnet for accident and malice alike. When we consider that the data that they process often relates directly to money, and in effect is money in many applications, then the attraction is heightened. Converging computing technology with telecommunications has produced real time systems so that there is no longer any delay between the giving of an instruction and its commission. Bank accounts are updated instantly, whether the instructions were bona fide or fraudulent. Even more mouth watering is the opportunity to initiate the process in one country, debit the account in a second country and post the proceeds to an account in yet a third country. Systems are no longer secreted in a whitecoat computer room environment — the terminal on the teller's desk might, with a little tweaking and know‐how, lead into the sanctus sanctorum of the corporate information heartlands, with devastating effects.