Reference no: EM131128797

Scenario:

An employee hacked into the human resource records system at the employee's place of business and changed the employee's base salary rate to obtain a pay raise. The employee did this by spoofing an IP address in order to eavesdrop on the network. Once the employee identified where the data was stored and how to modify it, the employee made the changes and received two paychecks with the new amount.

Fortunately, an auditor happened to discover the error. The auditor sent an e-mail to several individuals within the organization to let them know there was a potential problem with the employee's paycheck. However, the employee was able to intercept the message and craft fake responses from the individuals the original e-mail was sent to. The employee and the auditor exchanged e-mails back and forth until the employee was soon given access permissions for some other financial records. With this new information, the employee was able to lower the salaries of the president of the company and several other employees and then to include the salary difference in the employee's own paycheck.

The IT staff determined that the spoofing that occurred that allowed the employee to gain access to the human resources system was caused by a lack of authentication and encryption controls. As such, a local root certificate authority was installed to implement a public key infrastructure (PKI) in which all communication to the human resource system required a certificate. This would encrypt network traffic to and from the human resources system and prevent eavesdropping. It would also properly authenticate the host to prevent spoofing.

Task:

A. Perform a postevent evaluation of how the organization's IT staff responded to the attack described in the scenario by doing the following:

1. Describe the series of malicious events that led up to the incident.

2. Identify who needs to be notified based on the type and severity of the incident.

3. Outline how the incident could be contained.

4. Discuss how the factor that caused the incident could be eradicated.

5. Discuss how the system could be recovered to return to normal business practice.

a. Explain how the system could be verified as operational.

B. Perform a follow-up of the postevent evaluation by doing the following:

1. Identify areas that were not addressed by the IT staff's response to the incident.

2. Identify the other attacks mentioned in the scenario that were not noticed by the organization.

a. Describe the type and severity of the attacks not noticed by the organization.

b. Describe how these additional attacks can be prevented in the future.

3. Recommend a recovery procedure to restore the computer systems back to a fully operational state.

C. When you use sources, include all in-text citations and references in APA format.