Digital Security

This laboratory exercise is meant to familiarize students with some practical aspects of information security at home and the workplace.

Scenario

ABC Accounting Company is a company that manages the financials for various small companies on a national scale. They specialize in using the Quick Books accounting application that is accessed by ABCs employees via a Software as a Service (SaaS) arrangement where ABC pays a monthly fee per employee for access to the application. Accounting data for ABCs clients is stored by the application service provider on their cloud and also may be stored in a redundant fashion locally on ABCs servers and individual ABC employee hard drives (depends on up the option chosen by the ABC employee for the backup for a given clients information). ABC is an interesting company in that it recruits its small (from tens of thousands of dollars in revenue to a few million per year) clients via newspaper and magazine advertisements nationally and its website. Therefore, clients are almost always remotely located with respect to ABCs small main office in the San Francisco area of California. Another interesting aspect of ABC is that the majority of its workforce is located remotely as well. The company hires people online and through regional job fairs across the country. Employees are typically recent accounting major graduates from small colleges and universities that do not command a large salary relative to CPAs and more experienced accounting professionals. Very few employees work at the ABC main office (mainly top management, IT staff, a few actual accounting employees, and a few clerical staff employees). The rest of ABCs workforce, about 100 employees, work remotely from their homes which are located throughout the country and abroad (mainly India and Mexico). These employees have a set list of clients that each is responsible for. They utilize the Quick Books application remotely online and keep the financials for their assigned ABC clients. As mentioned previously, data is automatically stored on the Quick Books cloud, but these employees also have the option to designate backup copies be stored on their local hard drives and/or ABCs servers at their office in San Francisco. Employees must specify they which options (one or the other or both) they will to store at when entering Quick Books (besides the cloud which is automatically done without employee involvement). Since all storage is timestamped, ABC and employees know if information stored locally or at ABC is the most recent or not (since the cloud storage is always what is used for the Quick Books application, backups are only utilized in emergency situations if the cloud information is found to be corrupted or is unavailable for a long period of time).

Based on the Digital Security content of this module (text and supporting materials), complete each of the following:

Propose ways both from a technical point of view and a managerial policy point of view to ensure that ABCs remote employees are not hacked or compromise in any way the security of ABC and its clients information.

What types of information security problems are present for ABC and its remote employees? Explain each based on content from the text and supporting materials in the module.