Computer Incident Response Team (CIRT) Plan

Purpose

This project provides an opportunity to apply the competencies gained in the lessons of this course to develop a risk management plan for a fictitious organization to replace its outdated plan.

Learning Objectives and Outcomes

You will gain an overall understanding of risk management, its importance, and critical processes required when developing a formal risk management plan for an organization.

Required Source Information and Tools

The following tools and resources that will be needed to complete this project:

• Course textbook
• Internet      access for research

Deliverables

As discussed in this course, risk management is an important process for all organizations. This is particularly true in information systems, which provides critical support for organizational missions. The heart of risk management is a formal risk management plan. The project activities described in this document allow you to fulfill the role of an employee participating in the risk management process in a specific business situation.

Scenario

You are an information technology (IT) intern working for Health Network, Inc. (Health Network), a fictitious health services organization headquartered in Minneapolis, Minnesota. Health Network has over 600 employees throughout the organization and generates $500 million USD in annual revenue. The company has two additional locations in Portland, Oregon and Arlington, Virginia, which support a mix of corporate operations. Each corporate facility is located near a co-location data center, where production systems are located and managed by third-party data center hosting vendors.

Company Products 

Health Network has three main products: HNetExchange, HNetPay, and HNetConnect.

HNetExchange is the primary source of revenue for the company. The service handles secure electronic medical messages that originate from its customers, such as large hospitals, which are then routed to receiving customers such as clinics.

HNetPay is a Web portal used by many of the company’s HNetExchange customers to support the management of secure payments and billing. The HNetPay Web portal, hosted at Health Network production sites, accepts various forms of payments and interacts with credit-card processing organizations much like a Web commerce shopping cart.

HNetConnect is an online directory that lists doctors, clinics, and other medical facilities to allow Health Network customers to find the right type of care at the right locations. It contains doctors’ personal information, work addresses, medical certifications, and types of services that the doctors and clinics offer. Doctors are given credentials and are able to update the information in their profile. Health Network customers, which are the hospitals and clinics, connect to all three of the company’s products using HTTPS connections. Doctors and potential patients are able to make payments and update their profiles using Internet-accessible HTTPS Web sites.

Information Technology Infrastructure Overview

Health Network operates in three production data centers that provide high availability across the company’s products. The data centers host about 1,000 production servers, and Health Network maintains 650 corporate laptops and company-issued mobile devices for its employees.

Threats Identified

Upon review of the current risk management plan, the following threats were identified:

· Loss of company data due to hardware being removed from production systems

· Loss of company information on lost or stolen company-owned assets, such as mobile devices and laptops

· Loss of customers due to production outages caused by various events, such as natural disasters, change management, unstable software, and so on

· Internet threats due to company products being accessible on the Internet

· Insider threats

· Changes in regulatory landscape that may impact operations

Management Request

Senior management at Health Network has determined that the existing risk management plan for the organization is out of date and a new risk management plan must be developed. Because of the importance of risk management to the organization, senior management is committed to and supportive of the project to develop a new plan. You have been assigned to develop this new plan.

Additional threats other than those described previously may be discovered when re-evaluating the current threat landscape during the risk assessment phase.

The budget for this project has not been defined due to senior management’s desire to react to any and all material risks that are identified within the new plan. Given the company’s annual revenue, reasonable expectations can be determined.

Project Part 2 Task 4: Computer Incident Response Team (CIRT) Plan

By now you should have developed an RA, a risk mitigation plan, and a BIA, BCP, and DRP.

In this part of the project, you will create a CIRT plan for Health Network. The company headquarters (HQ) handles all incidents because the information security organization is located in Minneapolis, so the plan will have its roots at HQ. Make sure to incorporate your instructor’s feedback on earlier submissions if applicable to the CIRT plan.

Evaluation Criteria and Rubrics

§ Did the student consider the inputs provided in their earlier submissions?

§ Did the student develop a sound CIRT plan?

• Did the student create a professional,      well-developed report with proper grammar, spelling, and punctuation?