Aircraft Solutions Phase I

Company Overview

Aircraft Solutions (AS) designs and fabricates component products and services for their clients in the electronics, commercial, defense and aerospace industries. AS employees a large and skilled workforce of design engineers, programmers, machinist, assembly personnel. The company utilizes automated equipment in order to increase their production and reduce overall costs. By doing this, they are able to offer cost efficient design and modeling packages to their customers helping them to reduce their overall developmental cost which in turn has helped them to establish long term relationships plenty of repeat business. Aircraft Solutions consists of two separate divisions, the Commercial Division (CD) and the Defense Division (DD). They are located in Chula Vista, California and Santa Ana, California respectively.

Security Vulnerabilities

Hardware Vulnerability

Aircraft Solutions current hardware setup effectively leaves the company's and their client's information vulnerable to prying eyes. The current hardware network setup is only being protected by a firewall, two routers and a switch. Should someone gain access to the system, they may be able to easily gain access to information in several key areas such as human resources, accounting, and or the database. This information could vary from an employee's social security number, to proprietary company or client information. The crimes could range from identity theft to corporate espionage and the losses could range from thousands of dollars, all the way to millions and beyond. Firewalls are a good

Figure A-1 (Operational Strength & Weaknesses of Firewalls , 2013)

start for hardware security however, they have strengths and weaknesses and should not be counted on as a full proof measure or means of security (see figure A-1). Currently Aircraft Solutions only updates the firewall and router rule sets every two years which leaves the company vulnerable in that anyone who would gain access or be given access would have it for a long period of time.

All of the servers for AS are currently backed up onsite which could create a problem should a natural disaster, fire, flood, or perhaps even theft of the devices occur. Whether the motive is one of revenge, money or just proving that it can be done, all of the hardware related issues have a high probability of occurring in today's world and must be addressed in order to avoid a loss of data, money and clients.

Policy Vulnerability

The current security policy allows numerous people to have access to the system, possibly even those who do not or should not have access to said information. In order fot

...