Securing Aim Higher College's Digital Infrastructure

From my perspective, a wise thing to do would be to first do a thorough analysis of the website. Go through and see what the weak points are and try to analyze a solution. Aim Higher College has deployed an open source blog package. This package uses a database backend and allows users to create user IDs, sites, and their own content to post it. Recently, the service has had off-campus users who have posted links that appear to be directed towards university resources, but they are getting redirected toward off-campus malware sites. It seems that the website the college has deployed has become target of a DoS attack or other malware attacks.

To help resolve the issue it is highly critical to implement a trace route to see if all networks are intact and no network has been compromised. Next step would be to install anti-malware, anti-spyware as well as firewalls to help protect against the attacks. Other steps that could be implemented to protect against the attack would be to implement strong and lengthy passwords even consider encrypting the passwords since it correlates to sensitive data. Other safe practices that can be looked into is to have security access control measures where students and faculty have inside exposure of the website or in other words to be able to read/write and outsiders just have limited input.

A developer for Aim Higher College is creating a Web server form for submission of calendar events to the College’s event calendar. First let’s look into the type of the attacks the web server would be vulnerable to. The website server can fall into the wrong hands and face xss attacks where the attacker steals important information of the client and reduces the speed of the network and also sends large volume...

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...ements from the database applications.

A scan of Aim Higher College’s primary Web server using a Nikto shows a large number of default configuration files and sample files on many of the older servers. It seems from the scenario that there are possible vulnerabilities or exploits that are present in the files and if loaded and accessed it will cause some harm or damage to the machine and or network. Countermeasures to protect against this scenario would be the implementation of a secured network where it would be tough to access the files. Have a WPA2 wireless network in place so there is no sufficient way to manipulate the files. Also, implement patch management and keep up to date of anti-malware and anti-spyware updates. This helps in the summarization of the possible threats the College can face in certain scenarios and explains in how to protect against them.