Assessing information system vulnerabilities and risk

The deliverables for this project are as follows:

1. Security Assessment Report (SAR): This should be an 8-10 page double-spaced Word document with citations in APA format. The page count does not include figures, diagrams, tables, or citations.
2. Risk Assessment Report (RAR): This report should be a 5-6 page double-spaced Word document with citations in APA format. The page count does not include figures, diagrams, tables, or citations.
3. In a Word document, share your lab experience and provide screen prints to demonstrate that you performed the lab.

follow the attached outline to complete assignment

include diagrams

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Attached is OIG Audit Report. This OIG Audit Report and recommendations on the OPM Breach should help to develop Enterprise Level Security Plans.

Attached is a suggested outline and alternative templates for the Project 3 SAR and RAR. Again, these are just guidelines, you can adapt them anyway you like, as long as you address the questions/requirements for the project. I hope these help.

You are an Information Assurance Management Officer, IAMO, at an organization of your choosing. One morning, as you’re getting ready for work, you see an email from Karen, your manager. She asks you to come to her office as soon as you get in. When you arrive to your work, you head straight to Karen’s office. “Sorry for the impromptu meeting,” she says, “but we have a bit of an emergency. There’s been a security breach at the Office of Personnel Management.” We don’t know how this happened, but we need to make sure it doesn’t happen again, says Karen. You’ll be receiving an email with more information on the security breach. Use this info to assess the information system vulnerabilities of the Office of Personnel Management. At your desk, you open Karen’s email. She’s given you an OPM report from the Office of the Inspector General, or OIG. You have studied the OPM OIG report and found that the hackers were able to gain access through compromised credentials. The security breach could have been prevented, if the Office of Personnel Management, or OPM, had abided by previous auditing reports and security findings. In addition, access to the databases could have been prevented by implementing various encryption schemas and could have been identified after running regularly scheduled scans of the systems. Karen and the rest of the leadership team want you to compile your findings into a Security Assessment Report or SAR. You will also create a Risk Assessment Report, or RAR, in which you identify threats, vulnerabilities, risks, and likelihood of exploitation and suggested remediation.

The security posture of the information systems infrastructure of an organization should be regularly monitored and assessed (including software, hardware, firmware components, governance policies, and implementation of security controls). The monitoring and assessment of the infrastructure and its components, policies, and processes should also account for changes and new procurements that are sure to follow in order to stay in step with ever-changing information system technologies.

The data breach at the Office of Personnel Management (OPM) is one of the largest in US government history. It provides a series of lessons learned for other organizations in industry and the public sector. Some critical security practices, such as lack of diligence to security controls and management of changes to the information systems infrastructure were cited as contributors to the massive data breach in the OPM Office of the Inspector General’s (OIG) Final Audit Report, which can be found in open source searches. Some of the findings in the report include: weak authentication mechanisms; lack of a plan for life-cycle management of the information systems; lack of a configuration management and change management plan; lack of inventory of systems, servers, databases, and network devices; lack of mature vulnerability scanning tools; lack of valid authorizations for many systems, and lack of plans of action to remedy the findings of previous audits.

The breach ultimately resulted in removal of OPM’s top leadership. The impact of the breach on the livelihoods of millions of people is ongoing and may never be fully known. There is a critical need for security programs that can assess vulnerabilities and provide mitigations.

There are nine steps that will help you create your final deliverables. The deliverables for this project are as follows:

• Security Assessment Report (SAR): This should be an 8-10 page double-spaced Word document with citations in APA format. The page count does not include figures, diagrams, tables, or citations.
• Risk Assessment Report (RAR): This report should be a 5-6 page double-spaced Word document with citations in APA format. The page count does not include figures, diagrams, tables, or citations.
• In a Word document, share your lab experience and provide screen prints to demonstrate that you performed the lab.

For Lab

Select the following link to enter Workspace. and complete the lab activities related to network vulnerabilities.

You will now investigate network traffic, and the security of the network and information system infrastructure overall. Past network data has been logged and stored, as collected by a network analyzer tool such as Wireshark. Explore the tutorials and user guides to learn more about the tools you will use. Click the following link to read more about these network monitoring tools: Tools to Monitor and Analyze Network Activities.

You will perform a network analysis on the Wireshark files provided to you in Workspace and assess the network posture and any vulnerability or suspicious information you are able to obtain. Include this information in the SAR.

You will then return to the lab in order to identify any suspicious activities on the network, through port scanning and other techniques. You will revisit the lab and lab instructions in Step 7: Suspicious Activity.

Click here to access the Project 3 Workspace Exercise Instructions.

In order to validate the assets and devices on the organization’s network, run scans using security and vulnerability assessment analysis tools such as MBSA, OpenVAS, Nmap, or Nessus depending on the operating systems of your organization’s networks. Live network traffic can also be sampled and scanned using Wireshark on either the Linux or Windows systems. Wireshark allows you to inspect all OSI layers of traffic information. Further analyze the packet capture for network performance, behavior, and any suspicious source and destination addresses on the networks.

In the previously created Wireshark files, identify if any databases had been accessed. What are the IP addresses associated with that activity? Include this information in the SAR.

see the grading requirements in the excel document click project 3