First Case Assignment

Background:

Mega Oil Company, Inc. is a mid-sized petroleum company headquartered in the Southwestern United States employing around 2000 employees spread across 4 states. It has grown over the past decade by merging with other small oil and gas firms.

Mega Oil Company recently suffered a ransomware attack. The company was able to recover from the attack with the assistance of a third party IT Services Company.

Attack Analysis:

After collecting evidence and analyzing the attack, the third party was able to recreate the incident.

Mega Oil Company has a number of PCs configured for employee training. These training computers use generic logins such as training1, training2, etc. with passwords of training1, training2, etc.

The generic logins were not subject to lock out due to incorrect logins.

One of the firms purchased by Mega Oil Company allowed Remote Desktop Protocol (RDP) connections from the Internet through the firewall to the internal network for remote employees.

Due to high employee turnover and lack of documentation, none of the IT staff were aware of the legacy remote access system.

The main office has only a single firewall and IDS, but no DMZ or bastion host exists to monitor these incoming remote desktop connections.

An attacker discovered the access by port scanning the organization and used a simple dictionary attack to gain access to one of the training computers.

The attacker ran a script on the compromised machine to elevate his access privileges and gain administrator access. The attacker then installed tools on the compromised host to scan the network and identify network shares.

The attacker copied ransomware into the network shares for the accounting department allowing it spread through the network and encrypt accounting files. Critical accounting files were backed up and were recovered, but some incidental department and personal files were lost.

Instructions:

You have been hired by Mega Oil Company in the newly created role of CISO and have been asked to place priority on mitigating further attacks of this type.

Suggest one or more policies that would help mitigate against attacks similar to this attack.

Suggest one or more controls to support each policy.

Identify each of the controls as physical, administrative, or technical and how they would prevent, detect, and/or correct these attacks.

Keep in mind that Mega Oil Company is a mid-sized company with a small IT staff and limited budget. Your recommendations must be cost-conscious.

Clearly indicate how each policy you suggest will help mitigate similar attacks and how each control will support the associated policy

Do not attempt to write full policies or reuse existing policies (NIST, etc.) - simply summarize one or more policies you suggest in a few paragraphs each.

Please limit your paper to no more than two pages in MS Word and use APA formatting.

This assignment is due by Sunday November 12th, 11:59 pm EST