The scope of information security is becoming wider everyday due to new and emerging dimensions in the evolution of computer applications with the intention to lessen manual operations. These have necessitated the needs to manufacture portable and smart devices that can be interconnected to the Internet for home and industrial usages and for environmental surveillance. Consequently, global and national regulatory laws and statutes aimed at addressing illegal activities committed across computer and sensor networks are also increasing. Nevertheless, there are incessant cases of abuse through information leakage, masquerading, telephone hacking and password cracking that are perpetrated by some users of these technologies. Thus, this paper critically describes and analyses emerging security challenges in the investigation of smart devices that interface with computer systems. The review will be functionally useful to researchers, vendors, security professionals and IT end users in general.
The Internet and smart devices are evolving technologies that interconnect billions of different classes of users worldwide. Organizations that leverage on them for effective service delivery often generate huge amounts of data per day because they have complex security issues, bugs, threats and vulnerabilities. Hence, these technologies are facing constant criticisms. Generally, Information Technology (IT) is making it difficult to criminate intruders because intruders can anonymously use some smart devices that are interfaced with the Internet technology to perpetrate attacks on private and corporate networks and attacks on mobile devices. Recently, the scope of information security and how to effectively audit the Internet and smart devices have correspondingly generated some classical issues.
Information System (IS) auditors are routinely facing more challenges in auditing computer resources. For example, they face the challenge of how to adequately protect wired and wireless computer resources in organizations and how to properly configure security mechanisms to log admissible evidence that can be used to support network forensics. Consequently, this paper presents some of these challenges together with mitigation strategies that can help counter them.
Smart devices are potentially deployed to detect threats to and safeguard computer and network resources in data centers and IT departments of organizations. One of the advantages of these technologies is that users can remotely carryout some IT operations in the data centers and in respective offsite locations with the aid of some smart devices without physical presence in the sites and without the need to carry out the same operations from the consoles of immobile systems. Users of smart devices can privately communicate with other users by means of the Internet for clarification and exchange of IT issues.
