Assignment: The Technical Report and Executive Summary
Technical report: Your report should be a 6-7 page double-spaced Word document with citations in APA format. The page count does not include figures, diagrams, tables or citations.
The technical report: Provide recommendations for access control and authentication mechanisms to increase the security within the identity management system. Review the mission and organization structure of this healthcare organization. Review the roles within the organization, and recommend the accesses, restrictions, and conditions for each role. Present these in a tabular format as part of your list of recommendations.
Provide a comparison of risk scenarios to include the following:
1. What will happen if the CIO and the leadership do nothing, and decide to accept the risks?
2. Are there possible ways the CIO can transfer the risks?
3. Are there possible ways to mitigate the risks?
4. Are there possible ways to eliminate the risks?
5. What are the projected costs to address these risks?
Scenario
You are a systems administrator in the IT department of a major metropolitan hospital. Your duties are to ensure the confidentiality, availability, and integrity of patient records, as well as the other files and databases used throughout the hospital. Your work affects several departments, including Human Resources, Finance, Billing, Accounting, and Scheduling. You also apply security controls on passwords for user accounts. Just before clocking out for the day, you notice something strange in the hospital's computer system. Some person, or group, has accessed user accounts and conducted unauthorized activities. Recently, the hospital experienced intrusion into one of its patient's billing accounts. After validating user profiles in Active Directory and matching them with user credentials, you suspect several user's passwords have been compromised to gain access to the hospital's computer network. You schedule an emergency meeting with the director of IT and the hospital board. In light of this security breach, they ask you to examine the security posture of the hospital's information systems infrastructure and implement defense techniques. This must be done quickly, your director says. The hospital board is less knowledgeable about information system security. The board makes it clear that it has a limited cybersecurity budget. However, if you can make a strong case to the board, it is likely that they will increase your budget and implement your recommended tool company¬wide. You will share your findings on the hospital's security posture. Your findings will be brought to the director of IT in a technical report. You will also provide a non¬technical assessment of the overall identity management system of the hospital and define practices to restrict and permit access to information. You will share this assessment with the hospital board in the form of a narrated slide show presentation. You know that identity management will increase the security of the overall information system's infrastructure for the hospital. You also know that, with a good identity management system, the security and productivity benefits will outweigh costs incurred. This is the argument you must make to those stakeholders.
Step 1: Defining the Information System Infrastructure
Select a hospital or healthcare organization to research. You may choose an organization you are familiar with or can readily obtain information about. To maintain confidentiality, you do not need to mention the name of the organization. You may also choose a hypothetical/fictitious healthcare organization.
Others have researched several healthcare organizations, which have suffered major security breaches, extensively.
1. Describe the organization and structure including the different business units and their functions. You may use an organizational chart to provide this information.
2. Choose one or more mission-critical systems of the healthcare organization. Define the information protection needs for the organization's mission-critical protected health information (PHI). This information is stored in database medical records for doctors, nurses, and insurance claims billing systems, which are used to fulfill the organizational information needs.
3. Define the workflows and processes for the high-level information systems that you have just identified that will store PHI. Workflows and processes for healthcare organizations define how the organization gets its work done. They describe the movement of patient information to the business units that have needs to process and manage that information, from billing to physician care. All these organizations have hardware and software implementations of their information systems, and it is critical to understand these components, and how they are connected (known as their topology), so the appropriate protections can be applied. Your research may produce instances and examples of how an information system is connected, to include cybersecurity components like firewalls, in the information system and network diagram. Be sure you understand the benefits and weaknesses for the different network topologies.
You may incorporate what you find in your research, in your definition for workflows and processes for the high-level information systems and provide explanation of how that topology fulfills the mission for the health care organization. Your definition should include a high-level description of information systems hardware and software components and their interactions.
o Information systems hardware
o Information systems software
Supply this information as a diagram with inputs, outputs, and technologies identified. Consider how you might restrict access and protect billing and PHI information.
4. Also include following definitions:
o Open Systems Interconnections (OSI) Model
o TCP/IP protocols
o network protocols
Step 2: Threats
Now that you have defined the hospital's information system infrastructure, you will have to understand what are the threats to those systems and describe the types of measures that could address those threats. In this section, you will learn about different types of identity access management solutions and how they protect against the threat of unauthorized access.
To complete this section of the report, you'll brush up on your knowledge of threats by reading the following resources: web security issues, insider threats, intrusion motives/hacker psychology, and CIA triad. Take what you learned from these resources to convey the threats to the hospital's information systems infrastructure. Include a brief summary of insider threats, intrusion motives, and hacker psychology in your report as it relates to your hospital data processing systems. Relate these threats to the vulnerabilities in the CIA triad.
This section of your report will also include a description of the purpose and components of an identity management system to include authentication, authorization, and access control. Include a discussion of possible use of laptop devices by doctors who visit their patients at the hospital, and need access to hospital PHI data.
You will include following information in your report:
1. Authorization
2. Access control
3. Passwords
4. Multi-factor authentication
Define the types of access control management to include access control lists in operating systems, role-based access controls, files, and database access controls. Define types of authorization and authentication and the use of passwords, password management, and password protection in an identity management system. Describe common factor authentication mechanisms to include multi-factor authentication.
Step 3: Password Cracking Tools
You have successfully examined the threats to a healthcare organization's information systems infrastructure. Now, you must begin your research into password cracking software. Do some quick independent research on password cracking as it applies to your organization.
Not all password cracking tools will necessarily perform with the same speed, precision, and results, making it important to test a few different products. Compare the password cracking tools (Cain & Abel and Ophcrack) based on these characteristics, and include as part of your assessment and recommendations on the use of such tools. You will test the organization's systems for password strength and complexity and complete validation testing. You will compare the results obtained from your first and second tool.
You have tested and made comparisons of the performance of various password cracking tools and you have the data to support your recommendations for the use of such tools.
Format your assignment according to the following formatting requirements:
1. The answer should be typed, double spaced, using Times New Roman font (size 12), with one-inch margins on all sides.
2. The response also includes a cover page containing the title of the assignment, the student's name, the course title, and the date. The cover page is not included in the required page length.
3. Also include a reference page. The Citations and references should follow APA format. The reference page is not included in the required page length.