Application of Network Security Concepts

An international law firm has asked you to engage in a risk and mitigation evaluation and plan for their organization. The details of their infrastructure follow.

The organization has offices in:

• United States: New York, New York, and Palo Alto, California (headquarters).
• England: London.
• Russia: Moscow.
• Mongolia: Ulaanbaatar.
• China: Hong Kong.
• Japan: Tokyo.

Each location is set up as a star topology with 40 PCs networked together, with the exception of the law firm's headquarters in Palo Alto, California. The offices in New York are located on the 20th floor of a high rise. The remaining locations are all in commercial office centers with office space that shares a common wall with other businesses. All locations have a dedicated closet space that houses the networking equipment. Each location has IT support, and local users are managed locally with organization-wide replication of active directory changes that occur every 20 minutes.

Headquarters

The Palo Alto location has an additional 10 PCs and the following employees:

• Executives: Chief executive officer, chief financial officer, chief operating officer, chief information officer, and chief ethics officer, plus executive assistants (5).

• Accounting: Director, accounts payable clerk, and accounts receivable clerk.
• Human Resources: Director.
• Information Technology: Director and systems analyst.
• Legal: Attorneys (10), paralegals (10), legal assistants (10), and legal interpreters (2).
• Administration: Office administrator and office assistant.

Other Offices

Each of the other locations has 40 PCs and the following employees:

• Accounting: Director, accounts payable clerk, and accounts receivable clerk.
• Human Resources: Director.
• Information Technology: Director and systems analyst.
• Legal: Attorneys (10), paralegals (10), legal assistants (10), and legal interpreters (2).
• Administration: Office administrator and office assistant.

Further Details

Additional details about the project organization including the following:

• All executives, lawyers, paralegals, legal assistants, and legal interpreters have been issued an HP Pavilion dv7t Quad edition laptop with security provided by Zone Alarm's security suite. No desktops are used by these employees. Docking stations are used at the office. When out of the office, each of these employees conducts business wirelessly using AT&T's wireless card and Motorola's Droid X.

• All other employees use HP's Pavilion Elite HPE-570t series desktop.

• All laptops and desktops run the Windows XP operating system with WordPerfect, Office 2010 Professional, Windows Media, WebEx, and Adobe Reader 8 installed. The company uses Gmail as its e-mail provider. Droid X runs all of the above except for the XP operating system. Each runs the Android 2.2 OS.

• Each location uses an IBM BladeCenter HX5 server along with Microsoft Windows Server 2008 R2 (NOS).

• The switch for each location is Cisco's Catalyst 2960-S series model number 2960S-48TS-S with Cisco TrustSec installed.

• All locations but the Mongolia office have been equipped with Cisco's 3900 series Integrated Services Router Model 2951, with security provided by Cisco's Network Analysis Module (NAM).

• The Mongolia office is equipped with Cisco's Space Router due to Ulaanbaatar's unreliable infrastructure.

Connecting the locations to each other is an IP WAN utilizing an integrated services digital network primary rate interface (ISDN-PRI) back up and fiber distributed data interface (FDDI).

Use the study materials, the enterprise description, and any additional research needed to fill in knowledge gaps. Write a 3 page paper that addresses the following:

• Evaluate the existing infrastructure as it currently exists.
• Identify significant vulnerabilities, risks, and points that exist within the network architecture of the organization.
• Recommend specific security technologies/methods that can be implemented to mitigate risks and points of vulnerability within the organization.
• Explore the benefits and challenges of implementing a cloud based solution for this organization.