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You are a systems administrator in the IT department of a major metropolitan hospital. Your duties are to ensure the confidentiality, availability, and integrity of patient records, as well as the other files and databases used throughout the hospital. Your work affects several departments, including Human Resources, Finance, Billing, Accounting, and Scheduling. You also apply security controls on passwords for user accounts. Just before clocking out for the day, you notice something strange in the hospital’s computer system. Some person, or group, has accessed user accounts and conducted unauthorized activities. Recently, the hospital experienced intrusion into one of its patient’s billing accounts. After validating user profiles in Active Directory and matching them with user credentials, you suspect several user’s passwords have been compromised to gain access to the hospital’s computer network. You schedule an emergency meeting with the director of IT and the hospital board. In light of this security breach, they ask you to examine the security posture of the hospital’s information systems infrastructure and implement defense techniques. This must be done quickly, your director says. The hospital board is less knowledgeable about information system security. The board makes it clear that it has a limited cybersecurity budget. However, if you can make a strong case to the board, it is likely that they will increase your budget and implement your recommended tool company­wide. You will share your findings on the hospital’s security posture. Your findings will be brought to the director of IT in a technical report. You will also provide a non­technical assessment of the overall identity management system of the hospital and define practices to restrict and permit access to information. You will share this assessment with the hospital board in the form of a narrated slide show presentation. You know that identity management will increase the security of the overall information system’s infrastructure for the hospital. You also know that, with a good identity management system, the security and productivity benefits will outweigh costs incurred. This is the argument you must make to those stakeholders.

Step 1

Select a hospital or healthcare organization to research. You may choose an organization you are familiar with or can readily obtain information about. To maintain confidentiality, you do not need to mention the name of the organization. You may also choose a hypothetical/fictitious healthcare organization.

Others have researched several healthcare organizations, which have suffered major security breaches, extensively.

1. Describe the organization and structure including the different business units and their functions. You may use an organizational chart to provide this information.
2. Choose one or more mission-critical systems of the healthcare organization. Define the information protection needs for the organization’s mission-critical protected health information (PHI). This information is stored in database medical records for doctors, nurses, and insurance claims billing systems, which are used to fulfill the organizational information needs.
3. Define the workflows and processes for the high-level information systems that you have just identified that will store PHI. Workflows and processes for healthcare organizations define how the organization gets its work done. They describe the movement of patient information to the business units that have needs to process and manage that information, from billing to physician care. All these organizations have hardware and software implementations of their information systems, and it is critical to understand these components, and how they are connected (known as their topology), so the appropriate protections can be applied. Your research may produce instances and examples of how an information system is connected, to include cybersecurity components like firewalls, in the information system and network diagram. Be sure you understand the benefits and weaknesses for the different network topologies.You may incorporate what you find in your research, in your definition for workflows and processes for the high-level information systems and provide explanation of how that topology fulfills the mission for the health care organization. Your definition should include a high-level description of information systems hardware and software components and their interactions. Take time to read the following resources. They will help you construct your definition.
   • Information systems hardware
   • Information systems software

You may supply this information as a diagram with inputs, outputs, and technologies identified. Consider how you might restrict access and protect billing and PHI information.

1. The links shown below provide access to essential information you’ll need to complete this part of the hospital’s information system infrastructure definition. Click each link, review its resources, and refer to them as you compose this part of the definition.
   • Open Systems Interconnections (OSI) Model
   • TCP/IP protocols
   • network protocols

Step 2

Now that you have defined the hospital’s information system infrastructure, you will have to understand what are the threats to those systems and describe the types of measures that could address those threats. In this section, you will learn about different types of identity access management solutions and how they protect against the threat of unauthorized access.

To complete this section of the report, you’ll brush up on your knowledge of threats by reading the following resources: web security issues, insider threats, intrusion motives/hacker psychology, and CIA triad. Take what you learned from these resources to convey the threats to the hospital’s information systems infrastructure. Include a brief summary of insider threats, intrusion motives, and hacker psychology in your report as it relates to your hospital data processing systems. Relate these threats to the vulnerabilities in the CIA triad.

This section of your report will also include a description of the purpose and components of an identity management system to include authentication, authorization, and access control.  Include a discussion of possible use of laptop devices by doctors who visit their patients at the hospital, and need access to hospital PHI data. Review the content of the following resources.  As you’re reading, take any notes you think will help you develop your description.

1. Authorization
2. Access control
3. Passwords
4. Multi-factor authentication

Next, expand upon your description.  Define the types of access control management to include access control lists in operating systems, role-based access controls, files, and database access controls. Define types of authorization and authentication and the use of passwords, password management, and password protection in an identity management system. Describe common factor authentication mechanisms to include multi-factor authentication

Step 4

Executive summary: This should be a 2-3 page double-spaced Word document. (Summary of what the whole paper is all about)

Need 6-7 pages and in APA format.

Cybersecurity research

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Last Updated on April 25, 2020