Search results

Internet security is a pervasive concern for all companies. However, developing the business case to support investments in IT security has been particularly challenging because of difficulties in precisely quantifying the economic impact of a breach. Previous studies have attempted to quantify the magnitude of losses resulting from a breach in IT security, but reliance on self‐reported company data has resulted in widely varying estimates of limited credibility. Employing an event study methodology, this study offers an alternative approach and more rigorous evaluation of breaches in IT security. This attempt has revealed several new perspectives concerning the market reaction to IT security breaches. A final component of the study is the extension of the analysis to incorporate eSecurity vendors and a fuller exploration of market reactions before and after the denial of service attacks of February 2000. The key takeaway for corporate IT decision makers is that IT security breaches are extremely costly, and that the stock market has already factored in some level of optimal IT security investment by companies.

The purpose of this paper is to critically examine the vulnerabilities of the cloud platform affecting businesses trading on the internet. It aims to examine the appropriateness of the cloud computing, its benefits to the industry and helps to identify security concerns for businesses that plan to deploy one of the cloud platforms. It helps to identify areas where businesses should focus before choosing an appropriate Cloud Service Provider (CSP).

This paper presents the findings of an original research survey (200 IT professionals working both in the public and private sectors) undertaken to examine their privacy, and data security concerns associated with the cloud platform. Views of those who have yet to deploy cloud were analysed to detect the patterns of common security issues. Cyber fraud and trust concerns of the organisations are addressed and deployment of the secured cloud environment is outlined.

The survey analysis highlighted that the top concerns for organisations on cloud were security (93.8 per cent), governance (61.1 per cent) and a lack of control over service availability (56.6 per cent). The survey highlighted that the majority of IT professionals were not aware that some CSPs currently control the decryption keys that enable them to decrypt their client's data. This should be considered as a major security concern and it is one of the factors that should be looked into while vetting the service level agreement (SLA). Data loss and leakage (73.5 per cent) were voted as the top threat to cloud computing by respondents; this was followed by account, service and traffic hijacking (60.8 per cent). The paper examines various types of cloud threats companies have encountered.

The vast majority of the data are drawn from IT professionals with businesses mainly in the UK and the USA.

The paper advocates a proactive and holistic cloud‐cyber security prevention typology to prevent e‐crime, with guidance of what features to look for when choosing an appropriate cloud service provider.

This is the first analysis done that includes IT auditors, physical security personnel as well as IT professionals. The paper is of value to companies considering adoption or implementation of a cloud platform. It helps to assess the cloud by evaluating a detailed comparison of benefits and risk associated with the platform.

The purpose of this paper is to use the Twitter Search Network of the Apache NodeXL data discovery tool to extract over 5,000 data from Twitter accounts that twitted, re-twitted or commented on the hashtag, #NigeriaDecides, to gain insight into the impact of the social media on the politics and administration of developing countries.

Several algorithms like the Fruchterman-Reingold algorithm, Harel-Koren Fast Multiscale algorithm and the Clauset-Newman-Moore algorithms are used to analyse the social media metrics like betweenness, closeness centralities, etc., and visualize the sociograms.

Results from a typical application of this tool, on the Nigeria general election of 2015, show the social media as the major influencer and the contribution of the social media data analytics in predicting trends that may influence developing economies.

With this type of work, stakeholders can make informed decisions based on predictions that can yield high degree of accuracy as this case. It is also important to stress that this work can be reproduced for any other part of the world, as it is not limited to developing countries or Nigeria in particular or it is limited to the field of politics.

Increasingly, during the 2015 general election, citizens have taken over the blogosphere by writing, commenting and reporting about different issues from politics, society, human rights, disasters, contestants, attacks and other community-related issues. One of such instances is the #NigeriaDecides network on Twitter. The effect of these showed in the opinion polls organized by the various interest groups and media houses which were all in favour of GMB.

The case study the authors took on the Nigeria’s general election of 2015 further strengthens the fact that the developing countries have joined the social media race. The major contributions of this work are that policy makers, politicians, business managers, etc. can use the methods shown in this work to harness and gain insights from Big Data, like the social media data.