Essay: What is a Firewall and how do they protect a business?

According to the descriptions of Hayajneh and scholars (2013, pp. 3-5) a firewall will be described as a protection software that business will be seeking against the available online threats. Online threats, therefore, are the main concern that the firewall will be addressing, as shown below.
Figure 1 Firewall
In particular, this maintain that the firewall can equally be defined as a program software or equally a hardware component that is essentially mandated to screening out hacker, worm and virus that will be trying to reach the business computer network over the internet (Bhatt, Manadhata & Zomlot 2014, p. 39).
The basic functionality of the firewall is in limiting and monitoring the internet traffic that a business gets. Therefore, in terms of the manner in which the firewall protect the business or an organizations operations, the protection that they offer is particularly handled and directed by the customizing of the security setting for the firewall. This implies that the firewall will be in a position to control the streaming in and out of information or equally denying or granting access to a number of information accesses to the business.
According to Hayajneh and scholars (2013, pp. 6-7) the material benefit of having the firewall is, therefore, to protect the business computer networks from the outsider or the unauthorized attempts to control it or gain access. With this in mind, it is, therefore, true to assert that the basic functions of the firewall are positioned along the accepting or denying of access to the business computer network which are vulnerable from such external attacks.
2.0 Phishing is a type of scam. What is the purpose of phishing emails? List and describe four basic steps can you use to avoid phishing scams?
Phishing email are basically fraudulent mean by which attackers send legitimate looking email with the aim of extracting and getting financial information from the target audience of the attack (Facts 2006, p. 21). According to Kim & Cho (2015, p. 8) phishing is considered as a fraud and, therefore, making it illegal in nature. The confusing part is equally developed from the nature that these phishing email develop from the websites that are known and, therefore, the target of the attached will more often than not end up trusting the source and exposing themselves to the phishing attack.
The four most basic steps of avoiding a phishing attack are as follows (Singh, Somase & Tambre 2013, pp. 1-9);
1. One should never respond to emails that are bent on requesting for personal information’s
2. Make it a habit of visiting bank website by only typing the URL into the browsers address bar rather than copy pasting this information
3. Always maintain a regular check on your accounts
4. One should also ensure that the website that you are visiting is secure, this can be achieved by using a real time antivirus
These four steps are mostly described along the measures that an individual can take on his or her own to protect form the vulnerability that comes from phishing (Kim & Cho 2015, pp. 1-3). This is particular to the fact that being cautions of the use of personal informational and authentic website are the entry points from where one presents such open target position for phishing attacks (Barraclough et al. 2013, p. 4698).
 
3.0 Discuss the relationship between surveillance and privacy. Identify and describe what safeguards exist to protect the individual?
Surveillance is described under the monitoring and the watch that an entity and an individual will be having based on the security threat that they are or equally the threat that is imposed against them (Löfgren, Strange & Backman 2013, pp. 3-4). This implies that with surveillance there exists relations with privacy. According to Löfgren, Strange & Backman (2013, p. 2) this relationship is normally involved with the limitations that surveillance has based on breaching of privacy. Thus, the inquiry is on what degrees does surveillance breach the confidentiality or space and privacy. In fact, the more pressing concern have been advocated for by the interest drawn and propelled by digital surveillance. Surveillance should, therefore, be carried out with the knowledge of both parties. This will be to effects the concerns and equally avoid the concerns that are attached to breaching of privacy according to (Löfgren, Strange & Backman 2013, p. 6).
Developing from the privacy acts laws state agencies will need to make public any records kept against an individual when gathering personal data. This brings to light four recommendations,;
1. No record keeping on personal data should be hidden
2. The individuals should be able to get accesses the information held about him or her
3. Correction to identifiable information should equally be possible
4. Organization creating, maintaining, and using identified information must be precise and affirm the reliability of their sources to prevent misuse of data, which might raise reliability.
 
4.0 Describe ‘social commerce’ and discuss three potential benefits to customers and 3 potential benefits to the business.
According to the works of Liang & Turban (2011, pp. 7-10) social commerce can be described being a deviation of e-commerce. Social commerce is essentially involved with the social media networks in doing business. This is described along the position that online intersections have social commerce. Social commerce is, therefore, a tool that is used in social networking which has become of age as the new dimensions of marketing and e-commerce translations. Some good examples of social commerce are described along the directions of business having Facebook pages, Twitter handles, and even Instagram accounts. In essence, the growth that has been evidenced on e-commerce can widely be attributed to the trends and the development of social commerce according to (Liang et al. 2011, p. 74). This implies directly that social commerce is profitable. In fact, many will be of the justification of increased marketing positive results based on the marketing effect made through social commerce. In general social marketing maintains avenues with the dimensions of customer acquisition strategies, customer retentions and customer loyalty. With this in mind, the following are the advantage that social commerce has on the customers and the business (Zhou, Zhang & Zimmermann 2013, pp. 64-67).
4.1 Three potential benefits of social commerce to customers are:
1. Wide variety of sellers are available with personal social pages to handle clients
2. Lower prices as the sellers are normally involved in price wars
3. Different variety to choose from all available online social commerce sellers
4.2 Three potential benefits of social commerce to businesses are:
1. Increased traffics generates to online and social presence of the business
2. Direct relationship with the customers
3. It presents a new customer acquisition strategy