Reference no: EM132607352
UFCFHJ-15-M Information Security - University of the West of England
SECTION A
1. At your job interview for a senior information security position, a panel member asks you about your understanding of information security goals.
a) Stating any assumptions, briefly explain how two of the five pillars of Information Assurance: i.e. availability, integrity, authentication, confidentiality and non-repudiation, contribute to ensuring trust and integrity in information systems.
b) In information security terminology, outline what is meant by an adversary, risk, threat and vulnerability. Provide one example of each.
c) One of the interview panel members uses the terms computer security and information security interchangeably. Summarise how you would distinguish between each term. Give one example situation or scenario to illustrate each term.
2. The University was recently featured in the news headlines for all the wrong reasons. It had become the unhappy victim of a ransomware attack.
a) Illustrate a typical exploit kit from the attacker's perspective.
b) From the viewpoint of a criminal perpetrator, develop an attack strategy to inject or insert and activate the ransomware into the University.
c) Summarise prevention and recovery approaches the University could adopt to defend itself against and mitigate damage from a ransomware attack.
3. The INFOSEC organisation cites the top five cyber vulnerabilities with the highest potential for catastrophic damage as being: injection vulnerabilities, buffer overflows, sensitive data exposure, broken authentication and session management and security misconfiguration.
a) Outline the characteristics of three of INFOSEC's cited cyber vulnerabilities, providing one example of each.
b) Assume that an organisation's defensive information security strategies are based upon Sun Tzu's The Art of War, i.e. they involve deception, frustration, resistance and recognition and recovery.
Explain one of The Art of War based defensive information security strategies. Illustrate your answer with a defensive example based upon one of the top five INFOSEC cited cyber vulnerabilities.
4. Your non-technical boss is clearly confused by information security terminology and identity management concepts. He reluctantly asks for an explanation in straightforward, non-technical terms.
a) When developing technical information security measures, identification and authentication are considered important concepts. Summarise both concepts and state why they matter to an organisation.
b) Considering authorisation, explain what is meant by the principle of least privilege. Provide one example of the principle being applied to support your answer.
c) Your boss accepts your further explanation that access control involves four basic tasks: allowing access, denying access, limiting access and revoking access. But, he doesn't understand the difference between the different types of access control.
Show what both logical access control and physical access control are, by giving one example of each type of access control.