Assignment 2

Value: 25%

Due date: 22-Sep-2014

Return date: 13-Oct-2014

Length: 600-800 words

Submission method options

Alternative submission method

Task

Write between 600 to 800 words for each of the short-essay questions. All questions are of equal value. You should provide credible references for each question according to the Faculty of Business guidelines.

Topic 5 – Firewalls

Question 1 
(a) what are the two limitations of static packet filtering? Explain why each limitation is bad.   (2 marks)
(b) A firm has the following firewall policy: Employee access to Internet servers should be unrestricted and external clients should only be able to access the firm’s public webserver, http://www.csu.edu.au. The firm also has a finance server that should only be accessible to people in the finance department. The server and the finance departments are all on the internal subnet 137.13.2.4. The firm has a single large site. How would you implement this policy? Create both a firewall architecture and ACLs for the border firewall for both internal and external connection-opening attempts.      (3 marks)

Topic 6 – Host hardening

Question 2 
(a) Why do you think companies often fail to harden their servers adequately? Justify your explanation.     (2 marks)
(b) In their purest form, netbooks are PCs designed to have little or no software stored on them. Instead, they are designed to use cloud computing, in which the software and data are both stored on Internet servers. Netbooks in this pure form can only work when they have an Internet connection. Based on what you learned in this topic (Chapter 7), discuss security implications for netbooks, both pros and cons.   (3 marks)

Topic 7 – Data protection

Question 3
(a) How much data would you lose if your computer’s hard drive crashed right now? Could you reduce the amount of data that would be lost? How?     (2.5 marks)
(b) Could you get enough information from the Internet to take out a loan in another person’s name? You should provide any recent cases in Australia to support your explanation.      (2.5 marks)

Topic 8 – Application security

Question 4 
(a) Do you think programmers should be allowed to develop server-side dynamic webpages, given the dangers that are involved in doing so?   (2.5 marks)
(b) A company is warned by its credit card companies that it will be classified as a high-risk firm unless it immediately reduces the number of fraudulent purchases made by its e-commerce clients. Come up with a plan to avoid this outcome.         (2.5 marks)