Bright River Education and Charitable Holdings (BREACH) is an international organization supporting educational activities in the United States and Europe. A month ago, malicious hackers used a weakness in the public-facing website to exfiltrate sensitive business data including personally identifiable information (PII) for hundreds of thousands of students and teachers.

You are an information security consultant hired by BREACH to assess and fortify its information security defenses following the information security incident. During your initial assessment, you observed the following:

BREACH personnel are susceptible to email-based attacks.

BREACH employees are free to pick whatever passwords for their accounts they like.

Internal software development and database administration team is responsible for managing the website and other IT infrastructure (i.e., several software developers wear multiple hats as developers, database administrators, and system admins).

BREACH data are hosted on several on-site servers, including a file server, a database server, and a web server.

BREACH data communications and storage systems are quite old. At some point in the past, they were connected to the internet via a router, but use of encryption is inconsistent.

To save costs on real estate, BREACH shares an open-space office and landlord-provided network communication services with a dozen of other business tenants.

Based on your assigned readings and additional research, propose improvements and explain how your recommendations will help to make BREACH information systems more secure and compliant with the relevant regulations.

Be sure to cite your sources using APA format.