Spreadsheets Are Vulnerable to Fraud, Free Essay Sample

Duplicitous manipulations in businessspreadsheet files have already caused in billions of losses. The core underlying reason behind this spreadsheet susceptibility is the essential lack of controls, which makes altering of values, formulas, or dependencies without easily possible without detection (Patchett2000, p.13). For example, a malicious person may alter Subashs email address thus making him unreachable.

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Spreadsheets are prone to minor human errors

Another significant threat to information stored in spreadsheets is the ease of making human errors such as typing errors. (Abiteboul, Hull&Vianu1995, p.25).Overlooked negative signs and misaligned rows may sound harmless. However, they may harm investor assurance or cause a significant loss of opportunity amounting to millions of dollars. For example, one may enter equipment type information to the wrong village hence distorting the meaning.

Relational Databases

Microsoft Access is a Database Management System from Microsoft Company, which syndicates the relational Microsoft Jet Database Engine with a graphical user interface besides software-development tools (Microsoft 2014, p.21)

Field name Data type Description

Number Auto number Equipment ID Text Equipment type Text Equipment Village Text Equipment contacts person Text Equipment contact persons home GPS coordinates Number Equipment Contact person email Text Microsoft SQL Server

This is relational database management software with the main purpose of storing and recovering data as demanded by other software applications that may run either on the same processor or another processor across a network (Microsoft 2014, p.14).

Field Data type Description

ID Auto number Equipment ID Text Equipment type Text Equipment Village Text Equipment contacts person Text Equipment contact persons home GPS coordinates Number Equipment Contact person email Mail The above two are database programs. Through aninternet search, one can find a large number of available database programs, which can be used for securely storing and retrieving data.

Personal data

Personal data refers to data concerning a living individual who is or can be recognized either from the particulars or from the data in combination with other statistics that is in, or is likely to come into, the custody of the data controller.

According to the Data Protection Act, the table contains personal data. This is because it contains real names of individuals, their locations, and their contacts in theform of email address.

The use as described aboveconstitutes processing. This is because although data is entered directly processing takes place in converting these raw data into expressive information that can be tacit by the user.

How an Asymmetric Cipher Works

This is a class of cryptographic protocolsfounded on algorithms that need two separate keys, one of which is privateand the other is public.Even though different, the two parts of this key pair are scientificallyconnected. The public key is utilized, for example, to encode plaintext or to confirm a digital signature; whereas the private key is employed for the reverse operation, in these examples to decrypt ciphertext or to generate a digital signature.The term "asymmetric" shoots from the use of different keys to perform these reverse functions, each the inverse of the other as juxtaposed with conventional cryptography, which relies on the same key to accomplish both.

How an asymmetric cipher can support the confidentiality of Helen's message

Message authentication involves shredding the message to produce a "digest," and encoding the digest with the private key to produce a digital sign. Thereafter the engineer can verify this signature by computing the hash of the message, decrypting the signature with the signer's public key, and associating the computed digest with the decrypted digest. Equality amid the digests confirms the message is unchanged since it was signed, and that the signer, and no one else, deliberately performed the signature operation.

How an asymmetric cipher can support the integrity of Helen's message.

It is often a secure electronic communication over an exposed networked environment such as the internet, without depending on a covert channel even for key conversation. Open networked environments are vulnerable to a variety of communication security problems such as attacks and other security threats.

References

Microsoft (2014).Microsoft Office 2013: illustrated introductory, first course. Boston, MA, Cengage Learning.

Abiteboul, S., Hull, R., & Vianu, V. (1995). Foundations of databases. Reading: Mass Addison-Wesley.

Patchett, F. (2000). Spreadsheets using Excel 2000 or Office 2000. London, Osbourne.