Bit303 Information Technology Ethics Assessment Answer

Question 1

The “Panama Papers” are a huge trove of high confidential documents stolen from the computer systems of the Panamanian law firm Mossack Fonseca that was leaked online.

In early April 2016, the International Center for Investigative Journalism (ICIJ) rocked the offshore world when it announced that it possessed over 11.5 million pages of either “leaked” or “hacked” documents from the Panama-based law firm Mossack Fonseca. Mossack Fonseca was one of the world’s five largest providers of offshore services and has 40 offices world-wide. Simultaneously, an orchestrated crescendo of articles hit the press written by a limited group of investigative reporters that had been given exclusive access to the documents over the preceding 10 months. More articles continue to be published as more investigative journalists gained access to the documents and they worked their way through the mountain of data. Enough time has passed now to allow some initial perspectives on the possible impact of the so-called “Panama Papers.”

The documents are allegedly 2.6 terrabytes of data. To put this in perspective, the Guardian reports that this this leak is one of the largest in history, even larger than the 2010 WikiLeaks leak of US diplomatic cables (1.7 gigabytes), the so-called Offshore Leaks in 2013 (260 gigabytes) or the 2014 European tax files (4.4 gigabytes), the HSBC files in 2015 (3.3 gigabytes) or even the secret intelligence documents released by Edward Snowden in 2013.

Conduct a research on “Panama Papers Data Leak” to answer the questions below:

a) [Explain introduction] and What is the impact and consequences [Point 1,2,3] of Panama Papers data leak and who are at the risk of this data breach? [And what is the risk?] Discuss with examples.

b) What are the security vulnerabilities of Mossack Fonseca’s computer system which lead to a largest data breach [explain some problem] in the history? Explain your answer in technical and information security perspective.

c) What kind of security mechanisms and policies should be implemented [your proposal] to avoid this type of data breach? Explain with specific examples.

Question 2

COBIT (Control Objectives for Information and Related Technology) and ITIL (IT Infrastructure Library) are information technology management and IT governance frameworks, and both are popular around the world. They were created to provide management and guidance for IT services in businesses of all sizes. Conduct a research to answer the following questions.

(Note: Use the latest version of the framework)

a) Identify and discuss the [compare] similarities and differences between both the governance frameworks and [why is differ from ITSM] and how do they differ from ITSM (IT Service Management).