This fascinating and useful book by noted expert Peter Neumann contains accounts of mishaps, failures, and other disasters attributed to computers. Computer-based systems are everywhere in our lives, from the smallest radio components to the largest aerospace installations; and while computers can make our lives easier, they can also fail, and the people using them can make errors-causing inconvenience or even catastrophe. Neumann characterizes different kinds of computer-related risks, discusses risk causes and effects, and considers their implications. He also suggests ways to minimize such risks in the future. Featured are sections on reliability and safety problems, security vulnerabilities, privacy, and global systems.

1. The Nature Of Risks.

Requirements of Analysis and Design  [PTG: AW PROFESSIONAL]   (Computer Science)

About Peter Neumann

Peter G. Neumann (Principal Scientist in the Computer Science Laboratory of SRI International) runs the popular and provocative on-line Internet newsgroup, The Risks Forum, which he started in 1985. He also writes the widely read "Inside Risks" column in the Communications of the ACM. Running RISKS is a sideline to his research and development interests, which include computer hardware and software, systems, networks, and communications, as well as security, reliability, and safety--and how to attain them. He is a Fellow of both the ACM and the IEEE. He is often the first person called when computer disasters occur.

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"This sobering description of many computer-related failures throughout our world deflates the hype and hubris of the industry. Peter Neumann analyzes the failure modes, recommends sequences for prevention and ends his unique book with some broadening reflections on the future."

--Ralph Nader, Consumer Advocate

This book is much more than a collection of computer mishaps; it is a serious, technically oriented book written by one of the world's leading experts on computer risks. The book summarizes many real events involving computer technologies and the people who depend on those technologies, with widely ranging causes and effects. It considers problems attributable to hardware, software, people, and natural causes. Examples include disasters (such as the Black Hawk helicopter and Iranian Airbus shootdowns, the Exxon Valdez, and various transportation accidents); malicious hacker attacks; outages of telephone systems and computer networks; financial losses; and many other strange happenstances (squirrels downing power grids, and April Fool's Day pranks).

Computer-Related Risks addresses problems involving reliability, safety, security, privacy, and human well-being. It includes analyses of why these cases happened and discussions of what might be done to avoid recurrences of similar events. It is readable by technologists as well as by people merely interested in the uses and limits of technology. It is must reading for anyone with even a remote involvement with computers and communications--which today means almost everyone.

Computer-Related Risks:

• Presents comprehensive coverage of many different types of risks
• Provides an essential system-oriented perspective
• Shows how technology can affect your life--whether you like it or not!

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