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

United States Computer Emergency Readiness Team defines social engineering as, “an attacker uses human interaction (social skills) to obtain or compromise information…,” (McDowell). This may be someone talking to you and obtaining information you might use as a password or security questions. They may ask probing information that may be confidential about the company. The worst-case for social engineering can be quite significant. This could possibly include identity theft and using your information to access information that should be secure. Someone could literally pretend to be another and gain all the access the original person has in the company, this may also allow them to request additional access the original person did not have. Once in, the attacker could potentially take as much information as wanted or destroy information or other assets. This could lead to loss of data, assets, revenue, and/or loss of reputation by the company.

Workstation Domain
One issue possible in the workstation domain is malicious software on an associate’s computer.

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

attack.
LAN-to-WAN Domain
The largest risk of LAN-to-WAN is attackers finding a weakness in a firewall through a website. Worse case here is corruption or stealing of data, or taking down company systems with malicious software. If the company website becomes unavailable that can mean major loss of revenue and/or reputation to the company.

Remote Access Domain
Passing passwords as text is a major vulnerability to associates who use mobile access to the network.

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

passed.
System/Application Domain
Systems can be largely impacted by out of date applications. The company is also slow to upgrade software, fearing that changes may cause issues for the network or users. However, not upgrading software on a regular schedule can leave known security issues un-patched. The risk here is that the vulnerability is known, making it easier for attackers to penetrate company defenses.