Assignment 2: Security Risk Assessment

In 2006, a small business was created in the financial sector. The main purpose of the business was to provide customers with a close to real-time analysis of their stock portfolios. After months of doing business, several IT Administrators began to notice subtle changes in the corporate network. Shortly after that, the CEO began calling high-level meetings, especially with marketing and finance, to determine why the company’s profits for the last five months (July to December) began to take a downward spiral. This was occurring when industry-wide profit margins were easily expected to be higher and on the rise. The CEO could not understand why his company’s profits were instead decreasing, and hoped to get some insight from the meeting he had called. At this point, the CEO focused on finding the part of his business process that was failing and correcting any issues. During his meeting with Finance and Marketing, the only information presented to the CEO was that all operations and processes remained unchanged for the past year and (from charts shown below) that the number of new customers registering through their customer portal had dropped drastically for the last five months.