Week 2

There are some students who can only take one course at a time because they work. I get the opportunity to take two at the same time. I am lucky enough to be taking Risk Management and Information Security Management at the same time. It has taught me many things.

In Risk Management we learned about the different types of assessments:

Business Impact Assessment (BIA)
Vulnerability Assessment (VA)
Penetration Testing
Risk Assessment (RA)

In these, depending on the organization's size and its needs, an organization can use all of the above to beef up security.

This week, in Information Security Management, though I noted that while there were some project management tools that are similar they each have a purpose as well, but it is not as viable to utilize more than one. It can confuse things, at least from my point of view.

The different types of project management tools we learned about this week were:

Work Breakdown Structure (WBS)
Program Evaluation & Review Technique (PERT)
Gantt Chart

I had found a lot of links that helped me with learning about those different tools. Sometimes the book is not enough. I need it put into little words.

So, now that I have mildly vented my frustration, I found an interesting article about Adobe Flash. You see, I am a webmaster for three sites and all of them have some form of flash on them so this really caught my interest:

New Zero-Day Vulnerabilities Found In Adobe Flash Player

Adobe Acrobat and Reader products are used on both Windows and Mac machines. Macs are known for not being attacked like Windows machines and are so far not being affected, but that does not mean they will be safe. Because the malware is embedded in Adobe files, they can bypass scanners. With more and more websites using Flash Player or Adobe Reader, this makes everyone more susceptible to attacks that cannot be detected.

The malware crashes the programs and obtains control of the system the program is on. The malware can "bypass the antiexploitation features in Windows such as DEP and ASLR, and can get around the Internet Explorer sandbox."

I think this is something I may need to be doing more digging into the Adobe software I am using. For now, maybe I should begin blocking unwanted Flash content from running on my computer. It's a good thing I use Firefox and Chrome!!!!