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Communication Security: Remote Access and Messaging • Chapter 3 105

EXAM WARNING
Do not confuse remote access with remote control. Remote access is the
process of creating a connection from a remote location (such as a home
office, hotel room, and so forth), whereas remote control programs such
as Microsoft’s Remote Desktop, PCAnywhere, and VNC are used for
emulating PC consoles remotely. Although using a remote control pro-
gram may enable access to resources on their network, a network is not
established between that location and yours: rather, you have extended
the desktop of that machine to yours.

While the Security+ exam requires that you know how to protect personal e-
mail vulnerabilities with Pretty Good Privacy (PGP) as well as how to mitigate the
concerns of spam and viruses, vulnerabilities brought upon by the advent of mal-
ware, IM, and collaboration tools require that you be familiar with how these ser-
vices function and how they can be secured.

The Need for Communication Security

The need for communications-based security can be traced back thousands of years
to the days of ancient Egypt. Hieroglyphics were used by the Egyptians to commu-
nicate, assuming that only those familiar with the meaning of the drawings would
be able to decipher the messages.
As time went on, society became more complex and so did communications
security.Although the technologies have changed, the underlying reasoning behind
securing communications has not—that people need a secure method of sharing
information.As recently as five years ago, the general consensus was that all a user
had to do to protect their network was install a firewall in front of their Internet
connection and load anti-virus software on their network.Today, things are quite
different. Intellectual property including customer data has become the lifeblood of
today’s corporations.The need has become so great to secure these assets that an
entire new field of law has emerged to deal with this.The protection of customer’s
data has become a matter of local and international law.The Health Insurance
Portability and Accountability Act of 1996 (HIPAA) and the Sarbanes-Oxley Act of
2002 (SOX) are just a few of the regulations that force a company to adhere to
complex security precautions.

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