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GLOBAL FINANCE, INC. (GFI)

Global Finance, Inc. (GFI) is a financial company that manages thousands of accounts across Canada, the United

States, and Mexico. A public company traded on the NYSE, GFI specializes in financial management, loan

application approval, wholesale loan processing, and investment of money management for theircustomers.

The diagram below displays the executive management team ofGFI:

Figure 1 GFI Executive Organizational Chart

BACKGROUND AND YOUR ROLE

You are the Chief Security Officer, hired by COO Mike Willy, to protect the physical andoperational

security of GFI’s corporate information systems. Shortly after starting in your new position, you recognize

numerous challenges that you will be facing in this pursuit.

Your primary challenge, as is usually the case, is less technical and more of a political nature. CEO John

Thompson has been swept up in the “everything can be solved by outsourcing” movement. He believes

that the IT problem is a known quantity and feels the IT function can be almost entirely outsourced at

fractions of the cost associated with creating and maintaining an established internal IT department. In fact,

the CEO’s strategy has been to prevent IT from becoming a core competency since so many services can

be obtained from 3rd parties. Based on this vision, the CEO has already begun downsizing the IT

department and recently presented a proposal to his senior management team outlining his plan to greatly

reduce the internal IT staff in favor of outsourcing. He plans on presenting this approach to the Board of

Directors as soon as he has made a few more refinements in his presentation.

COO Willy’s act of hiring you was, in fact, an act of desperation: the increasing operational dependence on

technology services combined with a diminishing IT footprint gravely concerned Mike Willy, and he

begged to at least bring in an Information Security expert with the experience necessary to evaluate the

current security of GFI’s infrastructure and systems. The COO’s worst nightmare is a situation where the

Confidentiality, Integrity, and Availability of GFI’s information systems were compromised – bringing the

company to its knees – then having to rely on vendors to pull him out of the mess.

COO Willy has reasons for worrying. GFI has experienced several cyber-attacks from outsiders over the

past a few years:

In 2013, the Oracle database server was attacked and its customer database lost its confidentiality,

integrity, and availabilityfor several days. Although the company restored the Oracle database

server back online, its lost confidentiality damaged the company reputation. GFI ended up paying

its customers a large sum of settlement for their loss of data confidentiality.

In 2014, another security attack was carried out by a malicious virus that infected the entire

CEO

John Thompson

Vice President

Trey Elway

Executive

Assistant

Kim Johnson

Executive

Assistant

Julie Anderson

Executive

Assistant

Michelle Wang

CCO

Andy Murphy

COO

Mike Willy

CFO

Ron Johnson

Director of

Marketing

John King

Director of HR

Ted Young

network for several days. While infected the Oracle and e-mail servers had to be shut down to

quarantine these servers. COO Willy isn’t sure whether the virus entered GFI’s systems through a

malicious email, from malware downloaded from the Internet, or via a user’s USB flash drive.

Regardless of the source of the infection, the company lost $1,700,000 in revenue and intangible

customer confidence.

In a separate incident in 2014, one of the financial consultants left his company laptop

unprotected at the airport while travelling and it was stolen. It contained customer financial data

and the hard drive was not encrypted. Financial reparations were paid to impacted customers.

In 2015, a laptop running network sniffer software was found plugged into a network jack under a

desk in one of the unoccupied offices.

It is apparent from the number of successful cyber-attacks that GFI is an organization severely lacking in

information security maturity. COO Willy has commissioned you to perform a quantitative and qualitative

risk assessment of GFI’s infrastructure to determine where improvements could be made to reduce the risk

of future attacks.

CORPORATE OFFICE NETWORK TOPOLOGY

The diagram on the following page displays GFI’s Corporate Office Topology.

The GFI network infrastructure consists of a corporate WAN spanning 10 remote facilities that are

interconnected to the GFI headquarters’ central data processing environment. Data is transmitted from a

remote site through a VPN gateway appliance that forms a VPN tunnel with the VPN gateway in

headquarters. Through this VPN connection, remote office users access the internal Oracle database to

update the customer data tables. Through your inspection of the VPN configuration you discover that the

data transaction traversing the remote access connection to the corporate internal databases is not

encrypted.

Users are authorized to work from home and both dial-up and VPN remote access are available. Dial-up is

provided via Private Branch Exchange (PBX) and a Remote Access Server and VPN remote access is

provided via the VPN gateway. Authentication is password-based via MS-CHAP V2. Users are also able

to take advantage of GFI’s Bring Your Own Device (BYOD) policy and a Wireless antenna allows

wireless networking within headquarters. WEP is used to provide wireless security to BYOD users.

The network perimeter between the Internet and GFI’s internal network infrastructure is separated by two

Border (Core) Routers. These Border Routers then connect to two Distribution Routers and the VPN

Gateway. The Distribution Routers connect to a RAS Server, a Wireless Router that provides a bridge

between the Wireless Antenna and the internal network, and two Multi-layer switches. The Multilayer

switches connect to six (6) Access Layer VLAN switches that segregate the Accounting, Loan Dept,

Customer Services, Mgmt, Credit Dept, and Finance VLANs. The Multi-layer switches also connect to a

third Multi-layer switch that provides a connection to GFI’s servers in the Trusted Computing Base

subnet.

The trusted computing based (TCB) internal network is situated in a physically separated subnet. A bulk of

the data processing for GFI is handled by an Oracle database on a high end super computer located in the

TCB and the TCB also contains an intranet web server used by the internal support team, a Software

Update Services (SUS) server used for patch management, an internal DNS server, an e-mail server, and

other support personnel workstations. Although each corporate department is segregated physically on a

different subnet, they share access to the corporate data in the TCB network.

NOTE: The symbol represents a multilayer switch

CONSIDERATIONS WHEN CONDUCTING THE RISK ASSESSMENT:

This Risk Assessment and your suggested security improvements are of critical importance. CEO Thompson is set

on outsourcing GFI’s IT competency and you’ve been told of a plan from COO Willy to outsource network

management and security functions away from your department and over to a service integrator. COO Willy warns

you that the political environment will only become more contentious over time; you must make a compelling case

as to what value your department can bring over an integrator to provide security improvements in certain key areas

without a significant increase to the IT budget. It is extremely important that you take into account the value of the

assets being protected when selecting security controls to mitigate the risks (i.e. don’t spend $1000 to protect an

asset worth $500). In addition to what you learned from COO Mike Willy about the previous exploits of GFI’s

vulnerabilities and what you gathered when reviewing GFI’s network infrastructure, the COO has provided some

additional information that he wants you to take into account:

1. Ever since an article ran in Fortune about GFI, the network engineers report that they’ve noted a

significant spike in network traffic crossing into the internal networks. They report that they cannot be

certain what or who is generating this traffic, but the volume and frequency of traffic is certainly

abnormal. The management is very concerned over securing the corporate confidential data and

customer information. Suggestions on improvements to perimeter security and/or methods of

identifying the source of intrusions should be presented in your risk assessment.

90

90 Wireless

Antenn9a0

2. The interrelationship between data and operations concerns COO Mike Willy. Increasingly, some of

the ten (10) remote sites have been reporting significant problems with network latency, slow

performance, and application time-outs against the Oracle database. The company’s business model

is driving higher and higher demand for data, but your capability to respond to these problems are

drasticallylimited. Suggestions on reducing network latency or increasing application response time

and availability should be presented in your risk assessment.

3. Mobility is important for the organization to interact with the customers and other co-workers in near

real-time. However, the COO is concerned with mobility security and would like you to research best

practices for mobile computing. Security within the BYOD environment should be presented in your

risk assessment.

4. Employees enjoy the flexibility of getting access to the corporate network using a WiFi network.

However, the COO is concerned over the security ramifications over the wireless network that is

widely open to the company and nearby residents. Security within the wireless environment should be

presented in your risk assessment.

5. The company plans to offer its products and services online and requested its IT department to designa

Cloud Computing based e-commerce platform. However, the COO is particularly concerned over the

cloud computing security in case the customer database is breached.

ASSIGNMENTS

From the devices and systems identified in the GFI Corporate Network Topology, conduct a

thorough asset inventory, assign monetary values to each asset (quantitative), and assign a priority

value for each asset (qualitative) that could be used to determine which assets are most critical for

restoral in the event of a catastrophic event or attack.

Evaluate the perimeter security, make a list of access points internal and external(remote), identify

vulnerabilities and make suggestions for improvements to perimeter and network security.

Evaluate the remote access infrastructure, identify vulnerabilities and suggest security

improvements to mitigate risks to remote access.

Address the COO’s concern over the mobility security and design a secure mobile computing

(smart phones, tablets, laptops, etc.) in terms of authentication technologies and data protection.

Identify wireless vulnerabilities and recommend what safeguards, authentication technologies,and

network security to protect data should be implemented.

Evaluate the authentication protocols and methodologies within the wired, wireless, mobility and

remote access environments and suggest improvements to secure authentication forGFI.

Evaluate the web system protocols and vulnerabilities within the Intranet server and suggest

secure protocol improvements to improve security for web authentication.

Design a cloud computing environment for the company with a secure means of data protection at

rest, in motion and in process.

Assess all known vulnerabilities on each asset in this environment and impacts if compromised.

Using the asset inventory and the assigned values (monetary and priority) conduct a quantitative

and qualitative risk assessment of the GFI network.

Recommend risk mitigation procedures commensurate with the asset values from your asset

inventory. Feel free to redesign the corporate infrastructure and use any combination of

technologies to harden the authentication processes and network security measures.

Provide an Executive Summary.

You are welcome to make assumptions for any unknown facts as long as you support your

assumptions.

The Title Page, Table of Contents and References page(s) don’t count in your 15 page

minimum!!!

Risk Assessment Paper Rubric

You are given a fictional scenario above describing security issues affecting organizational assets. You willidentify

the risks associated with the assets, and recommend mitigating procedures. You will prepare a quantitative /

qualitative risk assessment to address risk factors on organizational assets. Your final paper will be 15–25 pages

long in a Word document (double-spaced with 12 point font) with APA citations for the resources you used in your

research and will be graded using the followingrubric.

Criteria Non-compliant Minimal Compliant Advanced

Inventory assets

and prioritize

them in the

order of mission

criticality.

Did not inventory or

prioritize assets in

the order of mission

criticality. (0)

Inventoried assets but

did not prioritize them

in the order of

mission criticality. (3)

Inventoried, prioritized

assets, but did not address

mission objectives in

their asset priority. (6)

Inventoried, prioritized

assets and addressed

mission objectives in their

asset priority. (10)

Evaluate

enterprise

topology and

perimeter

protection.

Did not evaluate

enterprise topology

and perimeter

protection. (0)

Evaluated enterprise

topology but did not

include perimeter

protection measures.

(3)

Evaluated enterprise

topology, perimeter

protection measures, but

did not address mission

objectives. (6)

Evaluated enterprise

topology, perimeter

protection measures, and

addressed mission

objectives. . (10)

Evaluate remote

access to the

networks.

Did not evaluate

remote access

protocols and

safeguards to the

network. (0)

Evaluated remote

access protocols but

did not address

security safeguards to

the network. (3)

Evaluated remote access

protocols, security

safeguards to the

network, but did not

address mission

objectives. (6)

Evaluated remote access

protocols, security

safeguards to the network,

and addressed mission

objectives. (10)

Evaluate

authentication

protocols and

methodologies.

Did not evaluate

authentication

protocols and

methodologies. (0)

Evaluated

authentication

protocols,

methodologies but

with insufficient data

or inadequate

description. (3)

Evaluated authentication

protocols, methodologies

with supporting data and

description, but lacks

mission objectives. (6)

Evaluated authentication

protocols, methodologies

with supporting data,

description; and addressed

mission objectives. (10)

Assign asset

values to

organization

assets for

quantitative /

qualitative risk

assessment.

Did not assign asset

values to

organization assets

for quantitative /

qualitative risk

assessment. (0)

Assigned asset values

to organization assets

for quantitative /

qualitative risk

assessment but

incomplete. (3)

Assigned asset values to

organization assets in a

complete inventory, but

did not address mission

objectives. (6)

Assigned asset values to

organization assets in a

complete inventory, and

addressed mission

objectives. (10)

Assess

vulnerabilities

on each asset

and impacts if

compromised.

Did not assess

vulnerabilities on

each asset and

impacts if

compromised. (0)

Assessed

vulnerabilities on

each asset and

impacts if

compromised; but

incomplete. (3)

Assessed vulnerabilities

on each asset and impacts

if compromised; of

complete inventory but

did not address mission

objectives. (6)

Assessed vulnerabilities

on each asset and impacts

if compromised; of

complete inventory and

addressed mission

objectives. (10)

Evaluate web

access protocols

and

vulnerabilities

and Cloud

Computing

Did not evaluate

web access

protocols and

vulnerabilities and

Cloud Computing

(0)

Evaluated web

access protocols and

vulnerabilities or

Cloud Computing.

(3)

Evaluated web access

protocols and

vulnerabilities and Cloud

Computing but did not

address mission

objectives. (6)

Evaluated web access

protocols and

vulnerabilities and Cloud

Computing and

addressed mission

objectives. (10)

Criteria Non-compliant Minimal Compliant Advanced

Recommend risk

mitigation

procedures

commensurate

with asset values.

Did not

recommended risk

mitigation

procedures

commensurate with

asset values. (0)

Recommended risk

mitigation procedures

commensurate with

asset values, but

incomplete. (3)

Recommended risk

mitigation procedures

commensurate with asset

values of complete

inventory, but did not

address mission

objectives. (6)

Recommended risk

mitigation procedures

commensurate with asset

values of complete

inventory, and addressed

mission objectives. (10)

Formulate 15-25

pages of a

quantitative or

qualitative risk

assessment in

APA format.

Did not follow

proper quantitative

or qualitative risk

assessment format,

and failed to

conform to APA

format. (0)

Followed proper

quantitative or

qualitative risk

assessment format but

did not conform to

APA format. (3)

Followed proper

quantitative or qualitative

risk assessment format

and conformed to APA

but insufficient reference

list and page count. (6)

Followed proper

quantitative or qualitative

risk assessment format and

conformed to APA in a

sufficient reference list

and page count. (10)

Executive

summary of risk

assessment.

Did not include an

executive summary.

(0)

Included an executive

summary but lacks

details. (3)

Included an executive

summary in details, but

did not address the

mission objectives. (6)

Included an executive

summary in details, and

addressed mission

objectives. (10)

 

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