Phase II: the Course Project recommend solutions to the potential weaknesses from the Aircraft Solutions

Running Head: SECURITY WEAKNESSES FOR ARCRAFT SOLUTIONS 0

SECURITY WEAKNESSES FOR ARCRAFT SOLUTIONS

Aircraft solutions design services and products for companies in the commercial defense, electronic and aerospace industry. Its mission is to provide customer success through machined products to meet, quality, costs and other requirements as scheduled. This document will focus on establishing the security weaknesses and related challenges for Aircraft solutions.

Software weaknesses

The aircraft solution software lacks authentication and anyone, both internal and external can gain access to the system. This compromises the integrity, confidentiality and availability of the system. This possesses several risks (Larkin et al., 2014).

Integrity; given the multiple accessibility of the system by many users, it lacks protection to the network traffic that would help to avoid corruption or data deletion. Object privileges are absent hence cannot control access to the systems data.

Confidentiality: given the variability of services and products as provided by aircraft solutions. In addition to this, they lack privacy in terms of communication, which is sharing of information with different companies that have diverse industrial backgrounds. It also lacks mechanism to authenticate and verify which resources can be accessed by whom.

Availability; there is often delays to the authorized users while accessing the system. The above-mentioned risks have a high possibility of occurring since nothing would serve to prevent their occurrence (Chou, 2013).

Lack of administrative and physical controls in the system is the main cause of such occurrences. This makes anyone to be able to manipulate shared resources among users. This makes the internal users to lack preference in control and data access. Modificat5ions can also be made to the system so that users would easily lose their data as well. In the software category, the risks range from industrial espionage to malicious hacking all through other external threats.

Privacy is a point of concern when one starts to use the system. In fact, lack of privacy would prevent and bar users from accessing the system. Software damage could include software diagnostic program attributes to 15 % of data lost. Boot sector and viruses follow suit accounting for 6 % of such data losses. In case of an episode that results into severe data loss, then the following outcomes are possible: first, data is recoverable with the assistance of a professional individual. Secondly, the data could be permanently lost and must be rekeyed. The possibility of recovery is dependent on the cause of data loss (Larkin et al., 2014).

Since the company is also has its intellectual property very valuable, loosing data can sometime be astronomical to the company. 18 % of data lost are often irretrievable, most importantly is that the value of data lost depends on the cost and quantity of the data lost. In case they experience this kind of loss, it might take hundreds of personnel to conduct recovery and reconstruction. In such cases, the company could be forced to part with thousands if not millions of dollars (Chou, 2013).

Hardware

In the commercial division, there lacks firewall equipment that deters PC entrance and it is essential for arrangements of remote access and validation of logins. The system is globally used hence allows access by companies in different countries globally. This makes the system at the risk of losing data because of fire hardware absence and inability of filtering the web traffic.

Additionally, this poses a risk of attacking the system from open ports. Malware would easily be loaded without any notice. The system also lacks alert mechanisms against any suspicious traffic. Such risks have a high possibility of happening since analysts have estimated that spyware infects 90 % of computers connected to the internet (Chou, 2013).

Thus, such weaknesses lead to lack of authentication of the credentials of the legitimate users. Moreover, the remote access from headquarters, intranet and extranet becomes unmonitored. Employee's confidential information is then put at risk. By extension, the company's databases will be corrupted thereby leading to losses in the system. This also calls for high maintenance costs since the system is to be frequently checked by engineers manually. The commercial division located at Chula Vista lacks firewall protection to protect its servers. This makes the company to be at the risk of having its system to be accessed by unauthorized users (Larkin et al., 2014).

Given the open access by both internal and external users, there could be security threat and compromises by such users. Faulty environments and human errors could all be evident. It may be difficult to measure the intrinsic value of data given the variation in the different types of data. It is approximated by several sources that the 100 MB of data is approximately worth $ 1 million. In fact, half of the companies that happen to lose data also face bankruptcy almost immediately (Larkin et al., 2014).

The competitive edge of the organization is eaten into when it spends much resource in providing security and recovery and reconstruction options. This could result into it losing some connection with the customers. Additionally, the trust of security by the users and clients could be lost. This could erode the pillar on which the organization's competitive advantage is anchored.

References

Chou, T. S. (2013). Security threats on cloud computing vulnerabilities. International Journal of Computer Science & Information Technology, 5(3), 79.

Larkin, R. D., Lopez Jr, J., Butts, J. W., & Grimaila, M. R. (2014). Evaluation of security solutions in the SCADA environment. ACM SIGMIS Database, 45(1), 38-53.