Security Problems Of E-Learning Essay

Abstract

This paper intends to shed light on the security problems faced by e-learning. It illustrates a case study on conducting security testing on e-leaning portals of Universiti Sains Islam Malaysia (USIM). Four of e-leaning portals were tested for common vulnerabilities using two of Web application scanner tools which are Acunetix and Netsparker. Moreover, a survey, based on ISO/IEC 27002:2005 was administered to USIM employees for assess the level of information security awareness amongst E-Learning Center employees. Using these two methods, a deeper understanding of the status of security level amongst USIM employees is presented from the standard security point of view and the need for a research to address and overcome the problem

These tools have some common features whether it is open source or commercial. These tools provide learning material; this material is divided into modules and lessons with various types of user’s rights based on the user’s role, i.e. learner, instructor, and manager. These users will also classify according to individual roles, year of study, enrolled lessons, and assigned

RESEARCH METHODOLOGY

This study adopted quantitative method. The quantitative method is used to get the data and result from the scanner tools about the vulnerabilities and the questionnaire. Data collected is analyzed using descriptive statistics analysis. Achieving the research aim, this study was conducted in two stages:

The first stage is assessing the vulnerability of the website and their security weaknesses by using web application scanner tools. This stage focused to investigate the security levels of e-USIM website. It is important to note that selecting a vulnerability Assessment for web services is a very difficult task as different scanners detect different types of vulnerabilities (Ihmouda & Mohd Alwi, 2013) (Vieira, Antunes, & Madeira, 2009).

3.1 Vulnerability Assessment

Web application security testing are a collecting of many automated tools set together and used to identify security vulnerabilities in web applications, using these tools can save extensive time and money, and there are many free and commercially tools available. Security Vulnerability Scanners Software is a type of software that aims to discovery vulnerabilities of a web application from potential intruders. There are numerous of Security Vulnerability Testing software applications which are free or paid software editions. the current study used two different software packages, Netsparker and