1 of 8

Weighing Security and Business Objectives for GeldCorp

Nathan Reem

January

2021

2 of 8

Scenario #1 Business Plans/Reasoning

Plan: GeldCorp wants to give all developers access to all data.

​

Reasoning: Request made by the Director of Engineering. Suggests that the free access will help the teams move faster, while cutting costs by managers being able to delegate work more efficiently.

2

3 of 8

Security Decision for Scenario #1

Scenario: Director of Engineering suggests giving all developers access to all data

  • Pro: Makes development easier.
  • Con: Allows any developer to access any user data, including sensitive PII that has nothing to do with their jobs.
  • Recommendation: Business should reject this suggestion on grounds of privacy and potential data exfiltration/insider threat.

3

4 of 8

Scenario #2

Plan: The Director of IT wants to make administration servers accessible from public IP addresses, instead of just from within the corporate subnets.

Reasoning: The director of IT argues that allowing anyone to access machines on the company's network will help their administrators, many of whom work remotely, to connect to the servers they need to manage. They expect this feature to improve retention and hope to see an increase in number of hours worked by employees.

4

5 of 8

Security Decision for Scenario #2

Scenario: The director of IT wants to make administration servers accessible from public IP addresses, instead of just from within the corporate subnets.

​

  • Pro: Administrators can work from any computer.
  • Cons: The servers would be publicly accessible, which is unacceptable for a private network.
  • Recommendation: The organization should reject this request. A Virtual Private Network (VPN) would be a better solution to this problem.

5

6 of 8

Scenario #3

Plan: Your newest SOC analyst wants to merge all email servers into a single database, hosted on a single machine.

​

Reasoning: The analyst argues that this setup will improve efficiency by making it easier to monitor the database and save money by reducing the number of machines on the network.

6

7 of 8

Security Decision for Scenario #3

Scenario: Your newest SOC analyst wants to merge all email servers into a single database, hosted on a single machine.

  • Pros: It would ultimately cost less and reduce the number of servers that attackers could potentially compromise, the number of machines that could expose vulnerabilities, and the number of machines that SOC monitors.
  • Cons: If the company has so many emails that it needs to maintain multiple servers, this suggestion won't be possible.

​

7

Recommendation: If the company doesn't have so many emails that multiple servers are necessary, hosting the data on a single machine is a good idea.

8 of 8

THANK�YOU!

Nathan Reem

Phone

714-878-5351

Email

natereem@gmail.com