English 421Y: Technical Writing Online

In my initial research efforts, my goal has been not necessarily to find information to include in the white paper itself, but to look for information that will help me proceed with my research. Our white paper will compare three web browsers for an IT department that is trying to choose one of them for use on its company's computers. Before doing the research on each of the browsers, we wanted to determine what current concerns of IT professionals are that would affect their browser decisions.

My google searches on led my to three news stories:

I found the first, from ciozone.com, through a Google search for "IT networking concerns." The story, "Top 5 Network Concerns Of IT Pros",
was a news article about the results of a survey conducted by CompTIA, an IT professional association, that outlined some current concerns of IT professionals. The top 5 most common concerns were listed, including networking security (No. 1), human error (No. 2) and keeping up with networking technology (No. 4). Those three concerns in particular could potentially be tied into our discussion over different browsers.

I found the second story, from cnet.com, by narrowing down my previous search to "IT network concerns browser" on Google. The article, "Concern grows over browser security", provided a little more insight into CompTIA's studies, including figures and quotes suggesting that browser-based attacks are actually a growing issue. I pulled quite a few potential keywords from this article.

The last of three articles, also from cnet.com, was found by searching for one of the keywords from the previous story, "web-based security threats," on Google. The story, "Ignore these browser flaws at your own risk", was an opinions blog entry that referred to a report by the Secure Interprise 2.0 Forum about Web 2.0's browser-based security flaws. The article listed a few of the key security threats from the report. My hope is that this list will allow us to narrow down some of our criteria for comparing browsers.

I wasn't too concerned about doing extensive checking on the credibility of the sources, because I was only looking for keywords to get started and not necessarily for quotes and numbers to use in the final report.

List of keywords:

• ComptTIA
• Network secuirty
• Human error by network users
• Current network technology
• Browser security
• Browser-based security threats
• Browser-based attacks
• Inbound/outbound traffic
• Inbound/outbound vulnerabilities
• Penetration testing
• Web 2.0
• Secure Enterprise 2.0 forum
• Cross site scripting (XXS)
• Cross Site Request Forgery/Cross Gadget Request Forgery
• Phishing
• Information Leakage
• Injection Flaws
• Insufficient Anti-Automation