Reference no: EM13268284

You work for a large public university that utilizes a web-based registration and cashiering system that allows students to register for, pay for, and drop classes. Naturally, peak usage times are during registration season shortly before the start of a new quarter. The system has been in place for about a year and a half and has greatly reduced the workforce needed to staff the registration office during registration season; as a result of implementing the new system, over three-quarters of the registration staff were reassigned to other parts of the university.

However, during registration for the most recent quarter, the web-based system suffered a crippling distributed denial-of-service (DDoS) attack that made the system unavailable for about 24 hours. The university's network staff was certain that the attack did not initiate from an external network source since the university has a series of mechanisms in place to intercept such attacks. Further investigation revealed that the attack originated from the internal network. The network team discovered that a password sniffer application was somehow installed on a large portion of the computers in various university computer labs. The password sniffer captured one of the administrative passwords that was recently used to remotely install a critical operating system patch for these computers. Once compromised, the computers were then used collectively to perform a DDoS attack that flooded the registration system's web servers with thousands of bogus HTTP requests, which quickly overwhelmed the servers and caused them to become unavailable.

As the lead network specialist, you have been asked to recommend countermeasures to protect the university's registration system against this type of denial-of-service (DoS) attack.
Task:
A. Create a diagram to illustrate how the attack occurred. In your diagram, include the following:

• The web server

• Computer labs

• Network equipment

• How the traffic is flowing to the registration system

B. Recommend in an executive summary (suggested length of 2 pages) preventive measures to counter this type of DoS attack.
Note: The executive summary will be read primarily by nontechnical management staff, so it is important that the summary sufficiently develops and addresses the topic but does not overwhelm the reader with unexplained technical terminology.
C. When you use sources, include all in-text citations and references in APA form