User Domain Case Scenario

Introduction

What is the worst that could happen to a large insurance and financial corporation with facilities in several states? Exploring the seven domains of a typical IT infrastructure leads to several possibilities. One possible scenario for each of the seven domains, user, workstation, LAN, LAN-to-WAN, remote access, WAN, and system/application will be explored in depth and taken to the furthest worst-case scenario.

User Domain The user domain can be a very large security hole that is not easy to cover. Helping people understand the value and reason behind certain security requirements can help close the gap, but it is something that needs to be continuous. One threat which people of a company face is social engineering. The

The worst-case scenario for malicious software would be the software traveling to other workstations and eventually servers. The hope would be that anti-virus or higher security in the rest of the network would keep it from traveling too far, but it is possible for something very new and very harmful to make its way to sensitive company servers.

LAN Domain The LAN domain is subject to sniffer attacks. A sniffer is an analyzer that picks up data packets traveling inside of the LAN (Gibson, 2011, p. 9). A worst-case scenario for a sniffer attack would be sensitive information being gathered. This could be confidential information or personal information about an associate. Usernames or passwords may be picked up or company information, which would not be available to the public, could be picked up by the

This would allow and attackers to more easily steal the data and log in to the network pretending to be the associate. This could lead to the attacker gaining access to company assets and causing malicious acts. This could lead to outages, loss of data, or loss of integrity to the company.

WAN Domain WAN is the internet to most companies (Gibson, 2011, p. 11). This can pose high risk to companies but is needed by associates to utilize company software and research. Natural weather occurrences and electrical issues can have an effect on the WAN. If the power or internet provider line is out due to a large storm or high winds, the internet is unreachable. Many associates have laptops, so work does not necessarily need to stop during an outage. However company phones and the internet will not operate. The company relies on many applications that utilize either the internet or intranet to be functional. Due to this, many people would not be able to continue working. The worst case scenario here is people being unable to complete work for several days on end until a severe storm has