Managing Risk in Information Systems
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JONES & BARTLETT LEARNING INFORMATION SYSTEMS SECURITY & ASSURANCE SERIES
LABORATORY MANUAL TO ACCOMPANY
VERSION 2.0
INSTRUCTOR VERSION
Copyright © by Jones & Bartlett Learning, LLC, an Ascend Learning Company – All Rights Reserved.
1
Introduction
The task of identifying risks in an IT environment can become overwhelming. Once your mind
starts asking “what if…?” about one IT area, you quickly begin to grasp how many
vulnerabilities exist across the IT spectrum. It may seem impossible to systematically search for
risks across the whole IT environment.
Thankfully, a solution is at hand that simplifies identifying threats and vulnerabilities in an IT
infrastructure. That method is to divide the infrastructure into the seven domains: Wide Area
Network (WAN), Local Area Network-to-Wide Area Network (LAN-to-WAN), Local Area
Network (LAN), Workstation, User, System/Application, and Remote Access. Systematically
tackling the seven individual domains of a typical IT infrastructure helps you organize the roles,
responsibilities, and accountabilities for risk management and risk mitigation.
In this lab, you will identify known risks, threats, and vulnerabilities, and you will organize
them. Finally, you will map these risks to the domain that was impacted from a risk management
perspective.
Learning Objectives
Upon completing this lab, you will be able to:
Identify common risks, threats, and vulnerabilities found throughout the seven domains of a
typical IT infrastructure.
Align risks, threats, and vulnerabilities to one of the seven domains of a typical IT
infrastructure.
Given a scenario, prioritize risks, threats, and vulnerabilities based on their risk impact to the
organization from a risk-assessment perspective.
Prioritize the identified critical, major, and minor risks, threats, and software vulnerabilities
found throughout the seven domains of a typical IT infrastructure.
Lab #1 Identifying Threats and Vulnerabilities in an IT Infrastructure
Copyright © by Jones & Bartlett Learning, LLC, an Ascend Learning Company – All Rights Reserved.
4 | LAB #1 Identifying Threats and Vulnerabilities in an IT Infrastructure
Risks, Threats, and Vulnerabilities Primary Domain Impacted
Unauthorized access from public Internet
Hacker penetrates IT infrastructure through modem bank
Communication circuit outages
Workstation operating system (OS) has a known software vulnerability
Denial of service attack on organization’s e- mail server
Remote communications from home office
Workstation browser has software vulnerability
Weak ingress/egress traffic-filtering degrades performance
Wireless Local Area Network (WLAN) access points are needed for LAN connectivity within a warehouse
Need to prevent rogue users from unauthorized WLAN access
Doctor destroys data in application, deletes all files, and gains access to internal network
Fire destroys primary data center
Intraoffice employee romance gone bad
Loss of production data server
Unauthorized access to organization-owned workstations
LAN server OS has a known software vulnerability
Nurse downloads an unknown e-mail attachment
Service provider has a major network outage
A technician inserts CDs and USB hard drives with personal photos, music, and videos on organization-owned computers
Virtual Private Network (VPN) tunneling between the remote computer and ingress/egress router
Note: Some risks will affect multiple IT domains. In fact, in real-world environments, risks and their direct consequences will most likely span across several domains. This is a big reason to implement controls in more than one domain to mitigate those risks. However, for the exercise in step 6 that follows, consider and select only the domain that would be most affected.
Subsequent next steps in the real world include selecting, implementing, and testing controls to minimize or eliminate those risks. Remember that a risk can be responded to in one of four ways: accept it, treat it (minimize it), avoid it, or transfer it (for example, outsource or insurance).
Copyright © by Jones & Bartlett Learning, LLC, an Ascend Learning Company – All Rights Reserved.
Pages from 9781284058680_ILMx_Risk20
