Friday, January 11, 2013

Hardware

Hardware are tangible pieces of computer equipment.

They includes mainframes, servers, desktops, UPS, mobile devices and firewalls.

Hardware risks arise from physical and logical contact.

Examples of these risks are as follows which I have separated into overt and surreptitious actions.

Overt
  • Vandalism
  • Adjust hardware settings
  • Theft of entire item or components like memory chips
Surreptitious
  • Spying (by attaching devices like keystroke loggers to capture information input to the computer)
  • Crashing the system
  • Access software and data for copying, deletion, alteration or transmission to another location
  • Malicious code