Information System Vulnerabilities And Risk In Cybertech - SAR

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 the likelihood of exploitation and suggested remediation.
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 the platforms you choose to include in your network design.
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 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?
You have a suite of security tools, techniques, and procedures that can be used to assess the security posture of your organization's network in a SAR.
Next, examine these resources on firewalls and auditing–RDBMS related to the use of the Relational Database Management System (i.e., the database system and data) RDBMS. Also review these resources related to access control.
Determine the role of firewalls and encryption, and auditing – RDBMS that could assist in protecting information and monitoring the confidentiality, integrity, and availability of the information in the information systems.