Reference no: EM132719870

Purpose: The purpose of this assignment is to assess student understanding on firewall design and configuration and students ability to exercise the operational, analytical and critical skills needed to reduce the potential security risks. Analyse and evaluate the organizational adoption of security controls.

Assessment topic: Firewall Setup and Configuration

Task details: This Assignment requires you to perform a scan on the network, prepare a Risk Mitigation report and configure some of the firewall settings using Kali Linux to secure the network and the distributed applications.

The assignment should be completed in two parts:

Part A: Use Nmap - a vulnerability scanning protocol in Kali Linux. Prepare a short Risk Mitigation plan to identify the threats for the assets.

Part B: Configure a few settings on the firewall for the network using Kali Linux to achieve a required level of security. The initial set of commands are given to you to start with. You may need to perform online search to complete the rest of the requirements for the firewall settings.

Case Study for the Assignment: Brunel University's infosec needs were originally very low in terms of maturity across many elements of infosec and information assurance, including cyber resilience and application of cybersecurity good practice. There was no one dealing with information security. There was no information security policy, and no deep culture for protecting data and information security. The status of cyber protection and cyber resilience was not really in good shape at all. That was because of decades of underinvestment in architecture, cyber tooling, process, and training skills.

As we are in the era where the cyber risk and cyber threats are at an exponential level, people began to see that we truly needed to get a grip on security and privacy. Data breaches could have the university paying compliance fines and put its reputation at risk as well, and students expect a high level of protection of their data The true impact of the internal audits and reports was finally admitting that the university was at risk. Some metrics supported my view that we weren't protecting the university intellectual property assets and personal or sensitive data particularly well.

The culture of handling data was not as strong as it should be, which was especially concerning, considering that they had a number of incidents over the years, particularly phishing and network intrusion. Universities have valuable information assets that can also impact the nation because of our tremendous amounts of high-end research, intellectual property, patents, and personal data. Once the gaps and risks had been identified the other challenge was: convincing our non-tech but savvy executive board that updating our infosec infrastructure, architecture, and processes was a worthy investment that would yield return on investment and real value for the future.

It is highly recommended that there is a need to impose a certain level of filtering for the network to be secure so as to sustain from threats and attacks. To add restrictions on a particular network it is necessary to identify the possible threats to the organization. For example, it is necessary to identify the important services that run on the network. In order to get this done, there is a need to perform scanning on the network to identify the services and ports of the applications. Furthermore, the firewall needs to be configured by adding rules to block and allow the services based on the requirements of the organization and the security perspectives of the network.
The assignment requires you to do the following:

1. Scanning network services using Nmap application tool from Kali Linux platform in Virtual Box. Run a set of scan commands (from the Nmap cheat sheet) and discuss how the results obtained from Nmap in terms of the services running on the network and other attributes provided in the result. The discussion of results should be supported with screenshots.
2. Write a short summary of the possible threats that can be experienced by the network to setup the firewall configuration accordingly.
3. Configure or set up firewall rules for the network using the UFW of the Kali Linux platform
Configure the following setting on the firewall using the appropriate commands in Kali Linux.
1. Check the status of the firewall
2. Enable/Disable firewall accordingly
3. Mow services such as TCP, SSH suing the name of the service or the port numbers
4. Verify the firewall rules after adding the above services
5. Secure a web server by blocking HTTP service allowing HTTPS service only
6. Allow the ports 20 and 21
7. Block the ports 400 and 423
8. Verify the firewall rules
9. Block the network connections originating from a specific address
10. Allow the port to transfer files from one computer to another
11. Allow MySQL connections from a specific IP address or subnet