Security Assessment and Recommendations

Executive Summary

The purpose of this report is to do a security assessment for Aircraft Solutions, an organization that designs and fabricates products and services for electronic, commercial, defense and aerospace companies, and to recommend solutions for any vulnerabilities that are discovered.

During the course of the assessment, two such vulnerabilities were identified: a software vulnerability that identified a weak user verification system and a hardware vulnerability that included loss of data due to the possible threat of a natural disaster.

The recommended solution for the software vulnerability was to implement a data encryption and control system offered by SafeNet, LLC. Utilizing the SafeNet Data Secure i450 appliance along with the Protect DB software will offer the organization the means of maintaining the data integrity, confidentiality and availability both the internal and external users require.

Natural disasters are common in Southern California where Aircraft Solutions is headquartered, so finding a solution to store their backed up data where it was not at risk of being affected by such a disaster was necessary. The recommended solution is to utilize Cloud storage, a virtual data center that stores data securely. This will eliminate the probability of both the data on the servers and the backups being destroyed simultaneously.

Security assessments such as this should be done on a regular basis, especially with technology changing rapidly and the threats that affect an organization’s assets. Resolving vulnerabilities as the system becomes aware of them will help minimize the risk of threat and help an organization maintain as secure a system as possible.

Company Overview

Aircraft Solutions (AS) designs and fabricates component products and services for companies in the electronics, commercial, defense, and aerospace industries. AS is headquartered in San Diego, CA with its Commercial Division located 40 miles east of its headquarters in San Diego County and the Defense Division located north of the headquarters in Orange County in the city of Santa Ana (Keller Graduate School of Management, 2012).

The mission of AS is to provide customer success through machined products and related services, and to meet cost, quality, and schedule requirements (Keller Graduate School of Management, 2012).

AS has a dedicated, trained workforce with a large skill base: design engineers, programmers, machinists, and assembly personnel to work its highly-automated production systems. The system administrators that are responsible for selecting and installing hardware, software and related upgrades, implementing information security measures, and maintaining support to ensure the manufacturing execution system is working properly are members of the Information Technology (IT) department.