Critical vulnerabilities in data protection practices

Assignment Help Computer Network Security

Reference no: EM133775942 , Length: word count:2000

IT Security

Assessment Details for Assessment Item:

Introduction
The case study has been selected from the news article titled "Equifax data breach FAQ: What happened, who was affected, what was the impact?" by Josh Fruhlinger.

The Equifax data breach of 2017 was one of the most significant cybersecurity incidents in recent history, impacting millions of consumers and highlighting critical vulnerabilities in data protection practices. Personally, identifying data of hundreds of millions of people was stolen from Equifax, one of the credit reporting agencies that assess the financial health of nearly everyone in the United States.

According to the above new article a top-level picture of how the Equifax data breach happened looks like this:

"The company was initially hacked via a consumer complaint web portal, with the attackers using a widely known vulnerability that should have been patched but, due to failures in Equifax's internal processes, wasn't.
The attackers were able to move from the web portal to other servers because the systems weren't adequately segmented from one another, and they were able to find usernames and passwords stored in plain text that then allowed them to access still further systems.
The attackers pulled data out of the network in encrypted form undetected for months because Equifax had crucially failed to renew an encryption certificate on one of their internal security tools.
Equifax did not publicize the breach until more than a month after they discovered it had happened; stock sales by top executives around this time gave rise to accusations of insider trading."

Further to the above, the article elaborates on the below:

"The crisis began in March of 2017. In that month, a vulnerability, dubbed CVE-2017-5638, was discovered in Apache Struts, an open- source development framework for creating enterprise Java applications that Equifax, along with thousands of other websites, uses. If attackers sent HTTP requests with malicious code tucked into the content-type header, Struts could be tricked into executing that code and potentially opening up the system Struts was running on to further intrusion. On March 7, the Apache Software Foundation released a patch for the vulnerabilities; on March 9, Equifax administrators were told to apply the patch to any affected systems, but the employee who should have done so didn't. Equifax's IT department ran a series of scans that were supposed to identify unpatched systems on March 15; there were in fact multiple vulnerable systems, including the aforementioned web portal, but the scans seemed to have not worked, and none of the vulnerable systems were flagged or patched.

Forensics analyzed after the fact revealed that the initial Equifax data breach date was March 10, 2017: that was when the web portal was first breached via the Struts vulnerability. However, the attackers don't seem to have done much of anything immediately. It wasn't until May 13, 2017 - in what Equifax referred to in the GAO report as a "separate incident" - that attackers began moving from the compromised server into other parts of the network and exfiltrating data in earnest. (We'll revisit this time gap later, as it's important to the question of who the attackers were.)

From May through July of 2017, the attackers were able to gain access to multiple Equifax databases containing information on hundreds of millions of people; as noted, a number of poor data governance practices made their romp through Equifax's systems possible. But how were they able to remove all that data without being noticed? We've now arrived at another egregious Equifax screwup. Like many cyberthieves, Equifax's attackers encrypted the data they were moving in order to make it harder for admins to spot; like many large enterprises, Equifax had tools that decrypted, analyzed, and then re-encrypted internal network traffic, specifically to sniff out data exfiltration events like this. But in order to re-encrypt that traffic, these tools need a public-key certificate, which is purchased from third parties and must be annually renewed. Equifax had failed to renew one of their certificates nearly 10 months previously - which meant that encrypted traffic wasn't being inspected."

After analysing the above case study, your group must detail the below points that could have been fixed in the Equifax data breach. Your report should be more than 2000 words, and your presentation should not be more than 3 minutes. The report should address the following:

Appropriate security technologies to fix the above-mentioned vulnerabilities.
Appropriate cryptographic techniques to fix the above-mentioned vulnerabilities.
Tools that you can use to identify and fix the vulnerabilities.
The techniques you suggest ensuring CIA (Confidentiality, Integrity, and Availability) before and after the Equifax data breach.

Presentation
The oral presentation must be recorded using PowerPoint and submitted through Moodle. All group members should gather in one place and conduct the presentation. The recommended method is a Zoom or Teams meeting. Each individual's presentation should not exceed 3 minutes. After recording the presentation, the group leader should submit it, and the rest of the members should submit the "Individual

Participation Form" to the report submission section. Individual members can explain the parts they worked on in the report. In cases of absence or late submissions, individuals will be affected individually.

Reference no: EM133775942

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