Library items tagged: factsheet

There’s little doubt that passwords are an inconvenience. Unfortunately they remain the most practical way for most of us to keep our on-line identities to ourselves. Without them, or if you don’t keep them secret, it would be far easier for someone else to masquerade as you, to read and modify any of your information and to take any action in your name.

This content can now be found at https://www.jisc.ac.uk/guides/networking-computers-and-the-law

PB/INFO/022 (05/07) The role of a computer network should, in its simplest terms, be to carry commands and information from client software running on one computer to server software running on another computer, and to return information in response to those commands. Servers can be divided into two types: those that are freely available to any client and those where access is restricted by some test such as a password, a certificate or an IP address. In an ideal world this would be all the security that was needed: however, this ideal fails in reality for two reasons.

PB/INFO/082 (11/04) Many organisations are looking to have some form of penetration testing performed on their systems. This may simply be to evaluate existing security measures and to find gaps where security needs improvement, but increasingly it is performed to comply with security standards when connecting to public sector networks or processing payment details.