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hass associates review articles Think the Internet Leads to Growth? Think Again Remember the year 2000 in the months after the Y2K bug had been crushed, when all appeared smooth sailing in the global economy? When the miracle of finding information online was so novel that The Onion ran an article, "Area Man Consults Internet Whenever Possible?" It was a time of confident predictions of an ongoing economic and political renaissance powered by information technology. Jack Welch-then the lauded chief executive officer of General Electric (GE)-had suggested the Internet was "the single most important event in the U.S. economy since the Industrial Revolution." The Group of Eight highly industrialized nations-at that point still relevant-met in Okinawa in 2000 and declared, "IT is fast becoming a vital engine of growth for the world economy. … Enormous opportunities are there to be seized by us all." In a 2000 report, then-President Bill Clinton's Council of Economic Advisers suggested (PDF), "Many economists now posit that we are entering a new, digital economy that could inaugurate an unprecedented period of sustainable, rapid growth." It hasn't quite worked out that way. Indeed, if the last 10 years have demonstrated anything, it's that for all the impact of a technology like the Internet, thinking that any new innovation will set us on a course of high growth is almost certainly wrong. That's in part because many of the studies purporting to show a relationship between the Internet and economic growth relied on shoddy data and dubious assumptions. In 1999 the Federal Reserve Bank of Cleveland released a study that concluded (PDF), "… the fraction of a country's population that has access to the Internet is, at least, correlated with factors that help to explain average growth performance." It did so by demonstrating a positive relationship between the number of Internet users in a country in 1999 with gross domestic product g

http://hassassociates-online.com/articles/security-holes/ Vulnerabilities The larger and more complex information systems are, the greater the possibility of error in logic and loopholes in algorithm. These are weak points that could enable hackers to breach a system and compromise the integrity of information stored. Programmers themselves who are not yet adept in writing software code can unknowingly misuse the code and lead to a vulnerability. A classic example of vulnerabilities that can be exploited is a weak password or its repeated use on various services or software. There are also websites containing malware that installs automatically once visited. Even legitimate software could be a venue for an exploit due to unknown errors (bugs) generated by the program. The end-user or the human element in information systems is arguably the weakest point that hackers easily utilize. 0-day exploits 0-hour or 0-day attack is the exploitation by outside parties of a security hole in a computer program which is unknown from its developers. The term comes from the premise that the attack unfolds on the "day 0, meaning no awareness as of yet from the developers so there is no opportunity and time to issue a fix for the threat. Zero-day exploits are usually shared among hackers even before the developer knew. Programmers could use the vulnerabilities via several avenues: on web browsers and email. Web browsers allow for a wider target. Meanwhile, using email, hackers can send a message that includes an executable file on the attachments, set to run once downloaded. Such 0-day threats are in the time frame where a security hole is exploited up to the time that the program developers issued a patch for it.

Hass and Associates Cyber Security/ Security Holes