Abstract
Sleepless nights face the data-processing manager who attempts to identify the
many destructive fates that can await his computer center: fraud, hardware
and software failures, operator errors, input errors, programming errors,
magnetic erasure, electromagnetic and acoustic monitoring. . . Hardware and
software techniques to prevent such disasters as leakage of private information,
penetration of a computerized information center, and the alteration or
destruction of a data base are surveyed in this article. Areas of concern include
remote-terminal access, cryptography, the communication subsystem, threat monitoring,
processing controls, certification, and the internal audit.
