Threats and Vulnerabilities Essay Example for Free

Threats and Vulnerabilities Essay Threat: An unauthorized employee tries to access data that is hosted on the server. Vulnerability: The organization does not use authentication and access controls. Likelihood: The likelihood is very low, depending on the organization and its budget. For the most part, most organizations have IT specialists that are tasked to keep everything on the network secure. In the government most all data is protected by multiple forms of security. LAN DOMAIN: Weak passwords could be broken with a brute force attacks. Ensure all access permissions are set up correctly. If there is not attention to detail with configurations unauthorized access may be easy to obtain on the network and information could be compromised or stolen. Threat: Any type of malicious software that enters the network. Vulnerability: Antivirus software doesn’t detect the virus. Likelihood: The likelihood is frequent. Anti-viruses have a hard time keeping up to date before new viruses pop up. The best way to deal with this is keeping the automatic update enabled for one’s virus protection program, and if you suspect a virus either shutdown or at least disconnect from the network to prevent further contamination of the network. REMOTE ACCESS DOMAIN: Remote users could be infected with a virus, and when they connect to the internal network, they can propagate the virus without any knowledge. Threat: An attacker modifies or defaces a company Web site. Vulnerability: The Web site isn’t protected. Likelihood: The likelihood of this is minimal, unless an inexperienced webmaster was hired. One way to avoid this is have a backup IT specialist to do checks and balances to ensure the website is secure. Another way to prevent this is by ensuring permissions and authentication is programmed properly. LAN-TO-WAN DOMAIN: A malicious web sites may be allowed access, malicious software may be downloaded, or firewalls are not configured properly; all of these can compromise a network or its’ website. Threat: A social engineer tricks an employee into revealing a password. Vulnerability: Users are not trained or briefed properly about the company’s policies. Likelihood: This is highly likely. Employees should have refresher courses given by the company on a regular basis. USER DOMAIN: Social engineering represents different ways for users to mingle and try to find a way to get a password out of another user it is done by phishing or even direct contact with a user. Threats and vulnerabilities are very important issues to tackle; it is up to company supervisors and IT leaders to ensure that everyone is up to date on computer viruses and how to keep hackers at bay. There are ways of doing this, by ensuring that employees are properly trained and briefed on any pertinent network issues that they have a direct affect on. One way is to ensure personnel are checking their company e-mail. Proper authentication needs to be setup for each user dependent on skills, their current position, and their need to have access; to avoid future issues. If giving remote access to an employee ensure the computer they use is updated before allowing them to log onto the VPN tunnel for work. The IT department or configuration team should ensure that they’ve configured web site filtering and access. To ensure limited access; Mac Address filtering brings another level of security and helps keep a log of hardware and when it accesses the company network. There are many ways to secure and protect a network, and there is also many way to attack one. No one plan is fool proof. A company must find the sweet spot for what system costs are more to maintain than it the costs to repair them if compromised.