Question

This is a short paper that requires you to study the provided scenario, research its questions/problems, and provide analysis and recommendations. SCENARIO You are the Information Security Officer at a medium-sized company (1,500 employees). The CIO asks you to identify and describe the top three known Windows and the top three known Linux server shortcomings/vulnerabilities. Explain how you can be kept up to date on this topic. Describe what can be done to make the server infrastructure more secure.

Answer 1

CLOUD COMPUTING:-

Cloud computing can be defined as the process of storing and accessing data and programs over the internet instead of local hard drives, cd, dvd etc. we can simply understand cloud as an Internet When you store data at local hard drives then you can access data very fastly without any network connection, there is no sync option available when you think about local storage but when you store data at cloud and use services of cloud computing then data is sync. Here meaning of sync is synchronization of data with cloud server. Some of the common cloud computing service examples are google drive,apple icloud, amazon cloud service etc.

Working of cloud computing:-

Cloud computing providers provides storage area to store data through internet connection. Once you create account for cloud storage, you can store data by uploading data on the cloud(Internet). when you are required to use that data you can login to that account and data is directly visible or you can download it into your local devices. Cloud computing servers allow you to increase the storage size .The biggest advantage of clouds are it's flexibility and security. Once you upload data on cloud , you access it from anywhere in the world, the only requirement is one smart phone connected with high speed internet.

Security risks in cloud computing:-

Incomplete data deletion:- Now we are working in high technological world where data recovery is mostly possible. Once you upload data on cloud , it means that your data is distributed over cloud servers.When you delete your data from cloud , it is not completely deleted , it can be recovered from backup section of cloud feature. So there is data leakage risk.

This can be solved by turning the backup feature off. Once you off the backup feature, your data is no longer available on cloud servers when you delete it.

Credential Vulnerability:- If an attacker gains access to user's cloud credential, then attacker has complete access to that account. They can delete , modify or update data which is something like loosing everything.

This can be solved by changing password regularly and attach one device for notification, when some other users login the cloud account.

Incomplete data monitoring:- You won't be able to monitor your data to and from cloud applications.

Risk of data breaches:- Attacker's use hacking tools to breach data from cloud servers. It can't be done easily but it is possible in cloud computing services. In 2016, linkedIn experieced data breach(164 million account credential).

The solution is multi-factor authorization. Once you know that data is very sensitive then you must use multi-factor authorization. It adds a multiple layer to login. You will have to go through multiple login steps, then only you will gain access.