历年考研英语阅读理解mp3(07-4)

[00:00:30]2007年黑暗版历年阅读真题解析    第四篇
[00:00:45]在线英语听力室

[00:01.18]It never rains but is pours.
[00:03.03]Just as bosses and boards have finally sorted out their worst

accounting 1 and compliance 2 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 3 lead to heads

rolling in the executive suite 4: 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 6 of customer and employee data this

year—
[00:44.14]from organizations as diverse as Time Warner,
[00:46.89]the American defense 7 contractor 8 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 9

”.
[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 5.
[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 10 America on notice that regulators will

act if firms fail to provide adequate data security.