Information and Communication Technologies (ICT)
Ans: Information and Communication Technologies (ICTs) is a broader term for Information Technology (IT), which refers to all communication technologies, including the internet, wireless networks, cell phones, computers, software, middleware, video-conferencing, social networking, and other media applications and services enabling users to access, retrieve, store, transmit, and manipulate information in a digital form.
Advantages of ICT
1. Creation of new IT based jobs
2. Automated production is possible due to the use of ICT
3. Easy and fast information sharing
4. ICT is one of the major subjects of study offered by the universities and colleges.
5. Electronic business is rising with the use if ICT.
6. It is used in entertainment. Computers are used in video editing, special effects, animations and cartoon character movies. They are used in music industry for composing, synthesizing, editing the music.
7. Banking transactions are much easier and effective through the use of ICT.
Disadvantages of ICT
1. Software piracy
2. Spreading computer viruses
3. Theft of information
4. Plagiarism
5. Hacking
6. Unemployment for computer illiterate
Social impact of ICT
Positive Impact of ICT
1. Impact on employment
2. Information sharing
3. Impact on business
4. Impact on health sector
5. Impact on communication sector
6. Automated production
7. Impact on education
8. Impact on entertainment
9. Impact on banking sector
Negative impact if ICT
1. Software piracy
2. Theft
3. Plagiarism
4. Harassment
5. Spreading computer viruses
6. Hacking
7. Unemployment
Digital Divide
Ans: Digital divide terms the borderline or disparities between the people who are effective and fully accessible to information, digital technological resources and those people who have partially accessible to information and digital information technologies or who have not.
Computer Ethics
Ans: Ethics is a set of moral principles that govern the behaviour of a group or individual. Therefore, computer ethics is a set of moral principles that regulate the use of computers. Some common issues of computer ethics include intellectual property rights.
For example: while it is easy to duplicate copyrighted electronic (or digital) content, computer ethics would suggest that it is wrong to do so without author’s approval. And while it may be possible to access someone’s personal information on a computer system, computer ethics would advise that such an action is unethical.
Objective of computer ethics
● To ensure the privacy and safety of computer users.
● To help people use the computer in the right ways.
● To guarantee that the works done by someone did not declare by other people.
Importance of computer ethics
● To protect personal and commercial information such as login and password info,
credit card and account information and government and commercial databases. It
also controls unwanted e-mail and ads(spams).
● To control plagiarism, student identity fraud and the use of copyrighted material.
● To promote moral and social values in society
Some examples of problems that do not follow computer ethics
1. Stealing funds via computers
2. Unauthorized computer entry
3. Hacking
4. Plagiarism
5. Phishing scam
Security Threat
Security threat is a possible danger that might exploit vulnerabilities in a computer system to breach security and thus cause possible harm. Vulnerability is a weakness or flaw in a computer system that can be exploited by a threat.
Types of security threat are:
1.Interception
Ans: Interception refers to the situation that an unauthorized party has gained access to a service or data. A typical example of interception is where communication between two parties has been overheard by someone else.
2. Interruption
Ans: Interruption refers to the situation, in which services or data become unavailable,unusable, destroyed and so on. Making the service inaccessible to other parties can be considered as an interruption.
3. Modification
Ans: Modifications involve unauthorized changing of data or tampering with a service so that it no longer adheres to its original specifications. Example of modifications include intercepting and subsequently changing transmitted data.
4. Fabrication
Ans: Fabrication refers to the situation in which additional data or activities are generated that would normally not exist. For example: an intruder may attempt to add an entry into a password file or database.
Security attack
Ans: An attack is an attempt to destroy, expose, alter, disable, steal or gain unauthorized access to or make unauthorized use of an asset. First of all, intruders analyze our environment and collect information in order to exploit vulnerabilities and then perform the desired type of attack in our computer system.
Types of security attack
1. Passive attack
Ans: An attack that attempts to learn or make use of information from the system but does not affect system resources is called the passive attack. It includes traffic analysis, monitoring of unprotected communications, decrypting weakly encrypted traffic, and capturing authentication information such as password.Passive attacks result in the disclosure of information or data files to an attacker without the consent or knowledge of the user.
2. Active attack
Ans: An attack that attempts to alter system resources or affect their operation is called active attack. This can be done through viruses, worms. Active attacks result in the disclosure or dissemination of data files, Denial of services or modification of data.
Security services
Ans: Security services is a service provided by a layer of communicating open systems,which ensures adequate security of the systems or of data transfers.
Security services can be categorized into 5 categories:
1. Authentication
Ans: It is the act of verifying the users identity that he/she claims to be. A user needs to be authenticated before providing access to the system. For example: whether a user can use the system or not is defined by authentication.
2. Authorization
Ans: It is the act of defining the privileges of authenticated users. Authorization controls access to objects. For example, once the user is authenticated , whether he can write the file abc.txt or not defined by authorization.
3. Data Confidentiality
Ans: It is the property that ensures that information is not made available or disclosed to unauthorized individuals, entities or processes. For this, plain text is converted into a scrambled message before transmitting or storing it so that semantics of the message remains hidden from unauthorized parties.
4. Data Integrity
Ans: Data integrity is the property that ensures that the data cannot be modified in an unauthorized way, or if it is modified in an unauthorized way, it should be detectable.
5. Non-Repudiation
Ans: Non-repudiation implies that one party of a transaction cannot deny having received a transaction nor can the other party deny having sent a transaction.
Author Spotlight
Santosh Chapagain
Gmail: chapagainsantoshcs@gmail.com
Phone no: +977-9863512955
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