Your boss wants you to draft a two- to three-page vulnerability process and assessment memorandum addressing the main points of a VM process for Mercury USA. You will cover the main elements of a vulnerability management process, tailored to Mercury USA’s business in the transportation sector, evaluate the OpenVAS scanning tool, and provide recommendations for mitigating the vulnerabilities found within the OpenVAS report.
The third-party pen tester used the free tool Open Vulnerability Assessment Scanner (OpenVAS) to scan Mercury USA’s network. Review the report from the OpenVAS Scan.
As you review the scan, consider some important points from Lesson 5:
Priority
Difficulty of implementation
Communication/change control
Inhibitors to remediation
MOUs
SLAs
Business process interruption
Degrading functionality
How Will My Work Be Evaluated?
An important part of your duties as a cybersecurity analyst will involve analyzing data from multiple sources and sensors such as antivirus/antimalware scanners, firewalls, insider threat monitoring systems, intrusion detection/prevention systems, SIEMs, vulnerability scanners, web application scanners, and other tools. You will also process logs from applications, auditing, network infrastructure devices, internet of things (IoT) devices, mobile communications devices, printers, servers, security appliances, and generalized logging collectors like syslog and Windows Event Logs.
As a cybersecurity analyst, you will be considered the subject matter and technical expert. A large part of your work will focus on identifying, analyzing, and mitigating vulnerabilities. For this assignment, you are asked to provide your supervisor with a technical evaluation of the organization’s vulnerabilities and propose a vulnerability management process. By summarizing your results in a short memorandum, you are showing how you use your technical knowledge to convey your ideas to others in a professional setting. Your ability to express your findings using the right mix of technical detail in a business context using an accepted format is an important workplace skill.
The following evaluation criteria aligned to the competencies will be used to grade your assignment:
1.1.1: Articulate the main idea and purpose of a communication.
1.3.1: Identify potential sources of information that can be used to develop and support ideas.
1.4.1: Produce grammatically correct material in standard academic English that supports the communication.
10.1.1: Identify the problem to be solved.
10.1.2: Gather project requirements to meet stakeholder needs.
12.1.2: Formulate policies, processes, and procedures based upon identified business needs.
12.2.1: Identify systems for the risk assessment.
You will use this report to write a two- to three-page memorandum for your manager, Judy. Follow the instructions in the VM Process Overview Template to record your work.