The Importance of American Business Information Protection It never rains but it pours, Just as bosses and boards have final

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问题             The Importance of American Business Information Protection
    It never rains but it pours, Just as bosses and boards have finally sorted out their worst accounting and compliance troubles, and improved their feeble corporation governance, a new problem threatens to earn them—especially in America—the sort of nasty headlines that inevitably lead to heads rolling in the executive suite: data insecurity. Left, until now, to odd, low level IT staff to put right, and seen as a concern only of data-rich industries such as banking, telecoms and air travel, information protection is now high on the boss’s agenda in businesses of every variety.
    Several massive leakages of customer and employee data this year—from organizations as diverse as Time Warner, the American defense contractor Science Applications International Corp and even the University of California, Berkeley—have left managers hurriedly peering into their intricate IT systems and business processes in search of potential vulnerabilities.
    "Data is becoming an asset which needs to be guarded as much as any other asset," says Haim Mendelson of Stanford University’s business school. "The ability to guard customer data is the key to market value, which the board is responsible for on behalf of shareholders." Indeed, just as there is the concept of Generally Accepted Accounting Principles (GAAP), perhaps it is time for GASP, Generally Accepted Security Practices, suggested Eli Noam of New York’s Columbia Business School. "Setting the proper investment level for security, redundancy , and recovery is a management issue, not a technical one," he says.
    The mystery is that this should come as a surprise to any boss. Surely it should be obvious to the dim most executive that trust, that most valuable of economic assets, is easily destroyed and hugely expensive to restore—and that few things are more likely to destroy trust than a company letting sensitive personal data get into the wrong hands.
    The current state affairs may have been encouraged—though not justified—by the lack of legal penalty (in America, but not Europe) for data leakage. Until California recently passed a law, American firms did not have to tell anyone, even the victim, when data went astray. That may change fast; lots of proposed data-security legislation is now doing the rounds in Washington, D. C. Meanwhile, the theft of information about some 40 million credit-card accounts in America, disclosed on June 17th, overshadowed a hugely important decision a day earlier by America’s Federal Trade Commission (FTC), that puts corporate America on notice that regulators will act if firms fail to provide adequate data security.
It can be inferred from Para. 5 that______.

选项 A、data leakage is more severe in Europe
B、FTC’s decision is essential to data security
C、California takes the lead in security legislation
D、legal penalty is a major solution to data leakage

答案D

解析 推理判断题。末段首句指出:现在这种状况,虽然不合理,可能会由于缺乏对资料泄露的法律制裁而愈演愈烈。结合最后一句内容可以推断,法律制裁对于防止资料泄露至关重要,故D“法律制裁是解决资料泄露问题的主要办法”为答案。第五段主要介绍美国资料泄露的现状及其立法保护资料的进展情况。本段开篇指出美国在资料保护方面的立法现状,并指出缺乏相关的法律保护助长了资料泄露事件的发生。第二句通过最近加州的立法,指出此问题正在得到法律的重视。第三句介绍了资料保护方面的好兆头:政府正逐步重视资料泄露现象,并对相关提案进行审议。第四、五句通过矛盾的现状(联邦贸易委员会的决定和信用卡账户信息失窃案)说明,由于缺少相关方面的法律制裁,资料信息泄露问题仍然不能得到彻底解决。本题就文章末段所阐述的内容考查考生对文章言外之意的理解。前三句指出由于the lack of legal penalty for data leakage(缺乏对资料泄露的法律制裁)导致美国资料泄露事件频发,因此法律制裁将是解决这一问题的关键所在,而D中也强调了legal penalty(法律制裁)的重要性。末段首句括号内容指出是美国缺乏法律制裁,而不是欧洲,A“资料泄露在欧洲更为严重”与文意不符,排除。该段最后提到“6月17日披露的美国大约4000万信用卡账户信息失窃事件让一天前美国联邦贸易委员会公布的一个重要决定黯然失色”,B“美国联邦贸易委会员的决定对于保障资料安全是必需的”无从推知。该段第二句提到加州最近通过一项法令,但由此不能得出它是首先进行安全立法的州,C“加州率先制定安全法规”为过度推断。
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