FMI's corporate information systems.

  You are the Chief Security Officer, hired by COO Kelly Smith, to protect the physical and operational security of FMI’s corporate information systems. Shortly after starting in your new position, you recognize numerous challenges that you will be facing in this pursuit. Your primary challenge, as is usually the case, is less technical and more of a political nature. The CEO has been swept up in the “everything can be solved by outsourcing” movement. He believes that the IT problem is a known quantity and feels the IT function can be almost entirely outsourced at fractions of the cost associated with creating and maintaining an established internal IT department. In fact, the CEO’s strategy has been to prevent IT from becoming a core competency since so many services can be obtained from 3rd parties. Based on this vision, the CEO has already begun downsizing the IT department and recently presented a proposal to his senior management team outlining his plan to greatly reduce the internal IT staff in favor of outsourcing. He plans on presenting this approach to the Board of Directors as soon as he has made a few more refinements in his presentation. COO Smith’s act of hiring you was, in fact, an act of desperation: the increasing operational dependence on technology services combined with a diminishing IT footprint gravely concerned Smith, and he begged to at least bring in an Information Security expert with the experience necessary to evaluate the current security of FMI’s infrastructure and systems. The COO’s worst nightmare is a situation where the Confidentiality, Integrity, and Availability of FMI’s information systems were compromised – bringing the company to its knees – then having to rely on vendors to pull him out of the mess. COO Smith has reasons for worrying. FMI has experienced several cyber-attacks from outsiders over the past a few years: In 2018, the Oracle database server was attacked, and its customer database lost its confidentiality, integrity, and availability for several days. Although the company restored the Oracle database server back online, its lost confidentiality damaged the company reputation. FMI ended up paying its customers a large sum of settlement for their loss of data confidentiality. In 2019, another security attack was carried out by a malicious virus that infected the entire Vice President Trey Elway Executive Assistant Kim Johnson Executive Assistant Julie Anderson Executive Assistant Michelle Wang CCO Andy Murphy COO Kelly Smith CFO Ron Johnson Director of Marketing John King Director of HR Ted Young CEO Matt Roche network for several days. While infected, the Oracle and e-mail servers had to be shut down to quarantine these servers. COO Smith isn’t sure whether the virus entered FMI’s systems through a malicious email, from malware downloaded from the Internet, or via a user’s USB flash drive. Regardless of the source of the infection, the company lost $1,700,000 in revenue and intangible customer confidence. • In a separate incident in 2019, one of the financial advisors left his company laptop unprotected at the airport while travelling and it was stolen. It contained customer financial data and the hard drive was not encrypted. Financial reparations were paid to impacted customers. • In 2020, a laptop running network sniffer software was found plugged into a network jack under a desk in one of the unoccupied offices. It is apparent from the number of successful cyber-attacks that FMI is an organization severely lacking in information security maturity. COO Smith has commissioned you to perform a quantitative and qualitative risk assessment of FMI’s infrastructure to determine where improvements could be made to reduce the risk of future attacks. CORPORATE OFFICE NETWORK TOPOLOGY The diagram on the following page displays FMI’s Corporate Office Topology. The FMI network infrastructure consists of a corporate WAN spanning 20 remote facilities that are interconnected to the FMI headquarters’ central data processing environment. Data is transmitted from a remote site through a VPN gateway appliance that forms a VPN tunnel with the VPN gateway in headquarters. Through this VPN connection, remote office users access the internal Oracle database to update the customer data tables. Through your inspection of the VPN configuration you discover that the data transaction traversing the remote access connection to the corporate internal databases is not encrypted. Users are authorized to work from home and both dial-up and VPN remote access are available. Dial-up is provided via Private Branch Exchange (PBX) and a Remote Access Server and VPN remote access is provided via the VPN gateway. Authentication is password-based via MS-CHAP V2. Users are also able to take advantage of FMI’s Bring Your Own Device (BYOD) policy and a Wireless antenna allows wireless networking within headquarters. WEP is used to provide wireless security to BYOD users. The network perimeter between the Internet and FMI’s internal network infrastructure is separated by two Border (Core) Routers. These Border Routers then connect to two Distribution Routers and the VPN Gateway. The Distribution Routers connect to a RAS Server, a Wireless Router that provides a bridge between the Wireless Antenna and the internal network, and two Multi-layer switches. The Multilayer switches connect to six (6) Access Layer VLAN switches that segregate the Accounting, Loan Dept, Customer Services, Mgmt, Credit Dept, and Finance VLANs. The Multi-layer switches also connect to a third Multi-layer switch that provides a connection to FMI’s servers in the Trusted Computing Base subnet.