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Project 3 Assessing Information System Vulnerabilities and Risk
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CYB 610 Project 3 You are an Information Assurance Management Officer, IAMO, at an organization of your choosing. One morning, as you’re getting ready for work, you see an email from Karen, your manager. She asks you to come to her office as soon as you get in. When you arrive to your work, you head straight to Karen’s office. “Sorry for the impromptu meeting,” she says, “but we have a bit of an emergency. There’s been a security breach at the Office of Personnel Management.” We don’t know how this happened, but we need to make sure it doesn’t happen again, says Karen. You’ll be receiving an email with more information on the security breach. Use this info to assess the information system vulnerabilities of the Office of Personnel Management. At your desk, you open Karen’s email. She’s given you an OPM report from the Office of the Inspector General, or OIG. You have studied the OPM OIG report and found that the hackers were able to gain access through compromised credentials. The security breach could have been prevented, if the Office of Personnel Management, or OPM, had abided by previous auditing reports and security findings. In addition, access to the databases could have been prevented by implementing various encryption schemas and could have been identified after running regularly scheduled scans of the systems. Karen and the rest of the leadership team want you to compile your findings into a Security Assessment Report or SAR. You will also create a Risk Assessment Report, or RAR, in which you identify threats, vulnerabilities, risks, and likelihood of exploitation and suggested remediation
The security posture of the information systems infrastructure of an organization should be regularly monitored and assessed (including software, hardware, firmware components, governance policies, and implementation of security controls). The monitoring and assessment of the infrastructure and its components, policies, and processes should also account for changes and new procurements that are sure to follow in order to stay in step with ever-changing information system technologies.
The data breach at the Office of Personnel Management (OPM) is one of the largest in US government history. It provides a series of lessons learned for other organizations in industry and the public sector. Some critical security practices, such as lack of diligence to security controls and management of changes to the information systems infrastructure were cited as contributors to the massive data breach in the OPM Office of the Inspector General’s (OIG) Final Audit Report, which can be found in open source searches. Some of the findings in the report include: weak authentication mechanisms; lack of a plan for life-cycle management of the information systems; lack of a configuration management and change management plan; lack of inventory of systems, servers, databases, and network devices; lack of mature vulnerability scanning tools; lack of valid authorizations for many systems, and lack of plans of action to remedy the findings of previous audits.
The breach ultimately resulted in removal of OPM’s top leadership. The impact of the breach on the livelihoods of millions of people is ongoing and may never be fully known. There is a critical need for security programs that can assess vulnerabilities and provide mitigations.
There are nine steps that will help you create your final deliverables. The deliverables for this project are as follows:
Security Assessment Report (SAR): This should be an 8-10 page double-spaced Word document with citations in APA format. The page count does not include figures, diagrams, tables, or citations.
Risk Assessment Report (RAR): This report should be a 5-6 page double-spaced Word document with citations in APA format. The page count does not include figures, diagrams, tables, or citations.
In a Word document, share your lab experience and provide screen prints to demonstrate that you performed the lab.When you submit your project, your work will be evaluated using the competencies listed below. You can use the list below to self-check your work before submission.
1.1: Organize document or presentation clearly in a manner that promotes understanding and meets the requirements of the assignment.
1.2: Develop coherent paragraphs or points so that each is internally unified and so that each functions as part of the whole document or presentation.
1.3: Provide sufficient, correctly cited support that substantiates the writer’s ideas.
1.4: Tailor communications to the audience.
1.5: Use sentence structure appropriate to the task, message and audience.
1.6: Follow conventions of Standard Written English.
5.2: Knowledge of architectural methodologies used in the design and development of information systems and knowledge of standards that either are compliant with or derived from established standards or guidelines.
5.6: Explore and address cybersecurity concerns, promote awareness, best practice, and emerging technology.
7.3: Knowledge of methods and tools used for risk management and mitigation of risk.
8.1: Demonstrate the abilities to detect, identify, and resolve host and network intrusion incidents.
8.2: Possess knowledge and skills to categorize, characterize, and prioritize an incident as well as to handle relevant digital evidence appropriately.Step 1: Enterprise Network Diagram
During Project One, you researched a hypothetical or actual organization of your choice. You had to understand the goals of the organization and the types of systems that would fulfill those goals. You will now research and learn about types of networks and their secure constructs that may be used in organizations to accomplish the functions of the organization’s mission. You will propose a local area network (LAN) and a wide area network (WAN) for the organization, define the systems environment, and incorporate this information in a network diagram. Discuss the security benefits of your chosen network design.
Read about the following computing platforms available for networks and discuss how these platforms could be implemented in your organization. Include the rationale for all platforms you choose to include in your network design.
common computing platforms
cloud computing
distributed computing
centralized computing
secure programming fundamentals
Step 2: Enterprise Threats
Review the OIG report on the OPM breach that you were asked to research and read about at the beginning of the project. The OIG report included numerous security deficiencies that likely left OPM networks vulnerable to being breached. In addition to those external threats, the report also describes the ways OPM was vulnerable to insider threats. The information about the breach could be classified as threat intelligence. Define threat intelligence and explain what kind of threat intelligence is known about the OPM breach.
You just provided detailed background information on your organization. Next, you’ll describe threats to your organization’s system. Before you get started, select and explore the contents of the following link: insider threats (also known as internal threats). As you’re reading, take note of which insider threats are a risk to your organization.
Now, differentiate between the external threats to the system and the insider threats. Identify where these threats can occur in the previously created diagrams. Relate the OPM threat intelligence to your organization. How likely is it that a similar attack will occur at your organization?Step 3: Scanning the Network
Note: You will use the tools in Workspace for this step. If you need help outside the classroom to complete this project, register for CLAB 699 Cyber Computing Lab Assistance (go to the Discussions List for registration information). Primary lab assistance is available from a team of lab assistants. Lab assistants are professionals and are trained to help you.
Click here to access the instructions for Navigating the Workspace and the Lab Setup.
Select the following link to enter Workspace. and complete the lab activities related to network vulnerabilities.
You will now investigate network traffic, and the security of the network and information system infrastructure overall. Past network data has been logged and stored, as collected by a network analyzer tool such as Wireshark. Explore the tutorials and user guides to learn more about the tools you will use. Click the following link to read more about these network monitoring tools: Tools to Monitor and Analyze Network Activities.
You will perform a network analysis on the Wireshark files provided to you in Workspace and assess the network posture and any vulnerability or suspicious information you are able to obtain. Include this information in the SAR.
You will then return to the lab in order to identify any suspicious activities on the network, through port scanning and other techniques. You will revisit the lab and lab instructions in Step 7: Suspicious Activity.
Click here to access the Project 3 Workspace Exercise Instructions.
In order to validate the assets and devices on the organization’s network, run scans using security and vulnerability assessment analysis tools such as MBSA, OpenVAS, Nmap, or Nessus depending on the operating systems of your organization’s networks. Live network traffic can also be sampled and scanned using Wireshark on either the Linux or Windows systems. Wireshark allows you to inspect all OSI layers of traffic information. Further analyze the packet capture for network performance, behavior, and any suspicious source and destination addresses on the networks.
In the previously created Wireshark files, identify if any databases had been accessed. What are the IP addresses associated with that activity? Include this information in the SAR.
