TABLE OF CONTENTS Technology is revolutionizing the way we do business. Information technology (IT) allows us to make most business transactions electronically, and the Internet has rendered access to information more widespread and cheaper. However, technology also poses impediments to the overall acceptance of e-business. For one thing, today's IT infrastructures are prone to numerous problems. Incidents in which information is irrevocably lost or hackers manage to steal confidential information are reported daily. It seems that the problems encountered in ebusiness are quite similar to those that already existed in traditional business; it is nothing new that information can be lost or divulged to unauthorized persons. However, as will be described in Section 5.2, the fact that many systems may contain the same vulnerability and a single attack can reach many targets simultaneously poses higher risks to today's e-business environments.
Irrespective of the many differences between traditional and e-business, it appears that risk management is needed in both cases to cultivate an awareness of the problems related to an underlying business infrastructure. However, given the speed with which e-business transactions are made, managing the risks related to an e-business infrastructure appears to be more difficult and to require new solutions.
IT infrastructures are prone to the risk of failures. Expressed in dependability terminology, a failure is an event that occurs when the delivered service deviates from the correct service (Powell and Stroud, 2003). We differentiate here between accidental, or nonmalicious, deliberate faults and deliberately malicious faults that can cause...
