歷年考研英語閱讀理解2007年04
[00:00:30]2007年黑暗版歷年閱讀真題解析 第四篇
[00:01.18]It never rains but is pours.
[00:03.03]Just as bosses and boards have finally sorted out their worst accounting and compliance troubles,
[00:08.49]and improved their feeble corporation governance,
[00:11.60]a new problem threatens to earn them—especially in America—
[00:15.20]the sort of nasty headlines that inevitably lead to heads rolling in the executive suite: data insecurity.
[00:22.50]Left, until now, to odd, low-level IT staff to put right,
[00:26.73]and seen as a concern only of data-rich industries such as banking,
[00:31.12]telecoms and air travel,
[00:33.10]information protection is now high on the boss's agenda in businesses of every variety.
[00:38.55]Several massive leakages of customer and employee data this year—
[00:44.14]from organizations as diverse as Time Warner,
[00:46.89]the American defense contractor Science Applications International Corp and even the University of California,
[00:53.10]Berkeley—have left managers hurriedly peering into their intricate IT systems
[00:58.06]and business processes in search of potential vulnerabilities.
[01:01.51]“Data is becoming an asset which needs to be guarded as much as any other asset,”
[01:07.45]says Haim Mendelson of Stanford University’s business School,
[01:11.22]“The ability to guard customer data is the key to market value,
[01:15.55]which the board is responsible for on behalf of shareholders”.
[01:19.16]Indeed, just as there is the concept of Generally Accepted
Accounting Principles (GAAP),
[01:24.04]perhaps it is time for GASP,
[01:26.88]Generally Accepted Security Practices,
[01:29.42]suggested Eli Noam of New York’s Columbia Business School.
[01:33.06]“Setting the proper investment level for security,
redundancy, and recovery is a management issue,
[01:40.20]not a technical one,” he says.
[01:42.32]The mystery is that this should come as a surprise to any boss.
[01:47.68]Surely it should be obvious to the dimmest executive that trust,
[01:50.96]that most valuable of economic assets,
[01:54.90]is easily destroyed and hugely expensive to restore—
[01:58.52]and that few things are more likely to destroy trust than a company letting sensitive personal data get into the wrong hands.?
[02:06.43]The current state of affairs may have been encouraged—
[02:09.88]though not justified—
[02:11.32]by the lack of legal penalty (in America, but not Europe) for data leakage.
[02:14.83]Until California recently passed a law,
[02:17.10]American firms did not have to tell anyone,
[02:19.60]even the victim, when data went astray.
[02:22.56]That may change fast:
[02:24.12]lots of proposed data-security legislation is now doing the rounds in Washington, D.C.
[02:29.72]Meanwhile, the theft of information about some 40 million credit-card accounts in America,
[02:35.51]disclosed on June 17th,
[02:37.92]overshadowed a hugely important decision a day earlier by America’s Federal Trade Commission (FTC)
[02:44.13]that puts corporate America on notice that regulators will act if firms fail to provide adequate data security.
