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Information Security

Table of contents

Information Security at Royal Holloway, University of London

Language: English Studies in English
Subject area: security services
University website: www.rhul.ac.uk

Definitions and quotes

Information
Information is any entity or form that provides the answer to a question of some kind or resolves uncertainty. It is thus related to data and knowledge, as data represents values attributed to parameters, and knowledge signifies understanding of real things or abstract concepts. As it regards data, the information's existence is not necessarily coupled to an observer (it exists beyond an event horizon, for example), while in the case of knowledge, the information requires a cognitive observer.
Information Security
Information security, sometimes shortened to InfoSec, is the practice of preventing unauthorized access, use, disclosure, disruption, modification, inspection, recording or destruction of information. It is a general term that can be used regardless of the form the data may take (e.g., electronic, physical). Information security's primary focus is the balanced protection of the confidentiality, integrity and availability of data (also known as the CIA triad) while maintaining a focus on efficient policy implementation, all without hampering organization productivity. This is largely achieved through a multi-step risk management process that identifies assets, threat sources, vulnerabilities, potential impacts, and possible controls, followed by assessment of the effectiveness of the risk management plan.
Security
Security is freedom from, or resilience against, potential harm (or other unwanted coercive change) from external forces. Beneficiaries (technically referents) of security may be persons and social groups, objects and institutions, ecosystems, and any other entity or phenomenon vulnerable to unwanted change by its environment.
Security
In the entire world, there is not a single establishment of the security industry that is not based on monopoly or on communism.  …  Political economy has disapproved equally of monopoly and communism in the various branches of human activity, wherever it has found them.  Is it not then strange and unreasonable that it accepts them in the security industry?
Gustave de Molinari, tr. J. Huston McCulloch, §IV of The Production of Security (Auburn, AL: Ludwig von Mises Institute, 2009; orig. 1849), pp. 27–28.
Information
Information can tell us everything. It has all the answers. But they are answers to questions we have not asked, and which doubtless don’t even arise.
Jean Baudrillard French semiologist. Cool Memories, Ch. 5 (1987, trans. 1990).
Security
This option the consumer retains of being able to buy security wherever he pleases brings about a constant emulation among all the producers, each producer striving to maintain or augment his clientele with the attraction of cheapness or of faster, more complete and better justice.If, on the contrary, the consumer is not free to buy security wherever he pleases, you forthwith see open up a large profession dedicated to arbitrariness and bad management.  Justice becomes slow and costly, the police vexatious, individual liberty is no longer respected, the price of security is abusively inflated and inequitably apportioned, according to the power and influence of this or that class of consumers.  The protectors engage in bitter struggles to wrest customers from one another.  In a word, all the abuses inherent in monopoly or in communism crop up.
Gustave de Molinari, tr. J. Huston McCulloch, §X of The Production of Security (Auburn, AL: Ludwig von Mises Institute, 2009; orig. 1849), pp. 57–59.
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