Assignment Case-Description EsacOmed
Assignment Case-Description EsacOmed
A0004N is organized around 7 themes. The first task is to produce a short reflection
that you write in order to form your opinion and view of the demo case under study.
The reflection is a free formulation without any scientific references and it aims at
clarifying your own thinking about information security. The purpose of this task is
for your personal benefit. You may review the reflection at the end of the course to
see if the course has contributed to a deeper understanding of information security.
The course is organized around weekly topic introductions. Each week’s lecture
session starts with a short group discussion about the previous week’s assignment,
and ends with a new assignment to be completed and brought to the next class.
Grading: You will receive 2.5 credits for completing all the weekly group
assignments. You will receive 5 credits for the individual examination by the end of
the course. It is the individual examination that can result in a VG grade (pass with
distinction) of the whole course. More information about the examination will follow.
Martin Lundgren
Tel: +46 (0)920 493990, Email: [email protected]
Each lecture will be live-streamed and can be viewed on the following address,
“virtual classroom” (aka. Zoom-room): https://ltu-se.zoom.us/j/9405955786?
pwd=U0FLTkV1b2EvSGswQmtIZERETHVzZz09
Course Literature
The course book can be either read for free online through LTU library (see link
below), or ordered as a hard copy (see reference below). You can find the relevant
course literature in the syllabus available here, or simply,
Plagiarism
Please not that it is forbidden to plagiarize something written by another person.
Plagiarism refers to copying texts or ideas and handing them in as one’s own work
without stating the source. The individual exam and all assignments will be subjected
to an automated plagiarism check. Therefore, they are to be written based on your
own knowledge and experiences, but you are free to use other’s ideas after
acknowledging them. The penalties for plagiarism are severe.
Assignment Case-Description: EsacOmed
1. Background
Centrally located on Sherwood Drive, Bletchley Park at Milton Keynes MK3 6EB,
lies EsacOmed. Although having been established as an organization since the early
1990s, EsacOmed is still considered an SME (Small and Medium-sized Enterprise).
More specifically, EsacOmed houses 20 employees, a CEO, and occasionally the
board. Resulting in 24 people in total, and thus seen as small by EU measurements.
Note: You choose what type of organization EsacOmed is. The choice you make
will, most probably, affect the security focus since each business have different
organizational objectives. You can choose from one of the following 10 suggestions,
or come up with one yourself.
EsacOmed’s Vision, Mission and General Strategy; Since the early days the CEO,
Horst Feistel, has always had the vision that EsacOmed will “help individuals and
businesses realize their full potential.” This vision set out to shape the mission that
each and everyone at EsacOmed is trying to fulfil daily, “to empower every person
and every organization on the planet to achieve more.” These statements have laid the
foundation for much of the strategic planning of EsacOmed.
For example, the CEO boasts proudly on EsacOmed’s homepage with the following
general statement of strategy, that “EsacOmed provides the highest quality [your-
selected-type-of-company] service in the industry.” Similarly, the CTO/CIO usually
announce their responding strategy during board meetings that aims to help achieve
the CEO’s statement of strategy. The CTO/CIO’s statement is somewhat more
specific, and aims to “provide high level of information systems services to support
the highest quality [your-selected-type-of-company] in the industry.”
However, a clause in the contract of the procurement demanded that the organization
selected for the contract must have an Information Security Program. EsacOmed, a
company that started out in the CEO’s garage, have not really thought about, let alone
spent any time on security over the past years. The norm in the company motivate
everyone to be careful, but there is no strategic plan aligning any serious security
effort with the goal of the organization. Who is responsible for what? Should there be
any rules for what you are not allowed to do? How are security patches kept up to
date, or are they even kept up to date as it is? These were just the tip of the iceberg of
questions without answers at EsacOmed.
The procurement stated that any prime candidate, in this case EsacOmed, were
allowed one year to implement the required security measures. Considering the nature
of the contract, it was simply too good to lose, and so the board, CEO and CTO/CIO
decided that a mature Information Security program must be developed and integrated
at EsacOmed. The contract in question asked for a minimum of three elements to be
included in the required Information Security Program. These were: Security Policy;
Risk Management; Contingency Planning.
Your Task; This is where you come in. Before EsacOmed goes any further with
developing a full Information Security Program, the board has decided to first get an
idea of what such elements would entail and look like. You, as an independent
information security expert, have been asked to give examples of these different
types of security elements. That is, investigate EsacOmed’s case-description and
suggest a few policy statements that could fit EsacOmed’s organization and help
secure their way of working. Similarly, conduct a small risk assessment to illustrate
some current threats towards the organization, and how these could be managed.
Lastly, should however a threat be realized, EsacOmed would like to see an example
of what a contingency plan could look like.
When and How; Throughout the course, each of the mentioned elements will be
covered in class, and homework assigned to help with EsacOmed’s request. By the
end of each lecture, further details will be given on how to proceed.
The EsacOmed case-description will serve as background. It will help you formulate
policy rules or regulations, identify potential risks and sources of threat, and possible
plans for contingency.
2. Organizational Structure
The organizational structure is built in an inline, functional staff aligned structure with
the Board and CEO at the top, with each division reporting directly underneath, and
operational personnel at the bottom. There are four divisions in EsacOmed:
Accounting, Human Resources, Information Technology and Marketing & Sales.
Considering EsacOmed role as a steadily developing Information Systems provider,
the IT-department is by far the largest division.
Board
CEO
Developer
There are five other companies on the same floor and wall-to-wall with EsacOmed, so
there is usually a lot of people in circulation, going up and down the stairs. A few
years back, AOL had a keypad to enter the building, but it was soon disabled during
office hours because of all the visitors. Now, visitors are only required to enter a PIN
to enter the building after 21:00 until 06:00.
The floor plan at EsacOmed’s office space invites to an open atmosphere with a big
meeting room right by the entrance. The large windows around the building makes the
office bathe in sunlight, creating a bright and open feeling. This is exactly what the
CEO has capitalized on, placing a “Fika-room” in the middle, and making each room
connected and open to inspire for discussions within the organization.
Guest can enjoy fast internet connection using the available WiFi, by signing in to
“EsacOmed WiFi” encrypted using the WEP-password “monkeybusiness” – an inside
joke that has been around almost for as long as the company itself. The WiFi is
provided by the shared router placed in the fika-room, for best signal strength.
4. IT and Infrastructure
Physical topology; As shown below, the typology identifies the physical location of
intermediary devices and cable installation. In total, there are 21 workstations at
EsacOmed, and four servers. On Network 1 (N1), are the developers, the servers, and
the IT-administrator and technicians. On Network 2 (N2) are the accounting and HR
department together with the Marketing and Sales. Lastly, Network 3 (N3) are the
CEO, CTO/CIO, guest WiFi, and the workstation kept in the meeting room used for
presentation by both visitors and EsacOmed’s employees.
Illustration 3: EsacOmed Inc. Physical Topology Diagram
Workstations; Each of the workstations, including the one in the meeting room are
running Windows 7 as their operating system. An Active Directory hosted on the
Mail/AD server is responsible for keeping track of all the users and their respective
accounts. The workstation in the meeting room only runs a shared administrator
account with “123456” as password, to allow ease of use for guests and visitors.
Servers; The following is a short description of the purpose and function of the
servers operated within EsacOmed,
Mail/AD Server is running Windows Server 2012 R2 with Microsoft Active
Directory Domain Services (AD DS), and Exchange 2013 for handling email.
Web Server is running CentOS 5.10 as its operating system, hosting Apache
v2.2.34 and MySQL v5.5.58 to manage the organization's website. Much of
the sales are made through the website, built on WordPress v4.6. Customers
usernames, passwords and credit card and all the other necessary information
are all stored in the MySQL database. Any purchase is manually managed by
the Sales personnel, which means asking the one of N1s’ (that is, either some
of the developers, the IT-admin, or technicians) to print out the latest entries
from the database. The web server uses a configuration with SSLv3 to encrypt
web-traffic. The SSL key-pair is usually created using some free online CSR-
generator (Certificate Signing Request) tool, and later installed on the web-
server along with the third-party signed certificate. For debug purposes, the
keys are also installed on the developer computers, and stored for safe-keeping
on a USB-stick marked “PKI-sick” (apparently some inside developer joke).
Source Control Server is one of the oldest servers at EsacOmed, and has
been around since the company started. A local version of Git was installed to
handle the source control and version handling. A few updates has since been
applied, mostly on an ad hoc basis. Last update was probably done some time
around 2014, and is currently running version 1.9.1. It has been on the agenda
for ages to manage the generated “ssh-keys” required to push new commits to
git, but due to the workload, the developers now share the same keys and user.
The ssh-keys are normally shared between the developers over email, or by
borrowing that same USB-stick otherwise used for safekeeping the SSL-key.
Production Server The production server is the heart of the organization, it is
hosting the actual product service that is offered by EsacOmed. It is running
Debian 7 “Wheezy” with KVM v1.1.2 to run multiple virtual PCs, each
running unmodified Linux or Windows images. Each virtual machine has
private virtualized hardware: a network card, disk, graphics adapter, etc.
Logical topology; As shown below, the typology identifies devices and the IP
addressing scheme.
Developers
192.168.1.50
192.168.1.60 Marketing
192.168.1.70 and Sales
Company Servers 192.168.1.80 IT-Admin and Accounting 192.168.2.40
Mail/AD Server 192.168.1.10 192.168.1.90 Technicians and HR 192.168.2.50
Web Server 192.168.1.20 192.168.1.100 192.168.1.130 192.168.2.10 192.168.2.60
Source Control 192.168.1.30 192.168.1.110 192.168.1.140 192.168.2.20 192.168.2.70 CTO/CIO CEO Meeting Room
Production Server 192.168.1.40 192.168.1.120 192.168.1.150 192.168.2.30 192.168.2.80 192.168.3.10 192.168.3.20 192.168.3.30
Internet