You have been assigned to assist with After Action Reporting in support of the Sifers-Grayson Blue Team. Your immediate task is to assist in analyzing and reporting on a Red Team penetration test described later in this document. As part of that report, you will identify weaknesses and vulnerabilities exploited by the attackers (the Red Team), compile a set of lessons learned, and then make recommendations for actions the company should take to close the gaps in their cybersecurity posture (at a minimum, you must address the identified vulnerabilities and weaknesses that were exploited by the Red Team). The Blue Team has provided you with a set of enterprise architecture diagrams (see figures 1-4 in this file) to help with your analysis of the incident and preparation of the summary report. You should also use the readings from Weeks 1-4 to help you identify security gaps and incident response capabilities which the company needs to implement.
Background
Sifers-Grayson is a family owned business headquartered in Grayson County, Kentucky, USA. The company’s physical address is 1555 Pine Knob Trail, Pine Knob, KY 42721. The president of the company is Ira John Sifers, III. He is the great-grandson of one of the company’s founders and is also the head of the engineering department. The chief operating officer is Michael Coles, Jr. who is Ira John’s great nephew. Mary Beth Sifers is the chief financial officer and also serves as the head of personnel for the company.
Recent contracts with the Departments of Defense and Homeland Security have imposed additional security requirements upon the company and its R&D DevOps and SCADA labs operations. The company is now required to comply with NIST Special Publication 800-171 Protecting Controlled Unclassified Information in Nonfederal Information Systems and Organizations. The company must also comply with provisions of the Defense Federal Acquisition Regulations (DFARS) including section 252-204-7012 Safeguarding Covered Defense Information and Cyber Incident Reporting. These requirements are designed to ensure that sensitive technical information, provided by the federal government and stored on computer systems in the Sifers-Grayson R&D DevOps and SCADA labs, is protected from unauthorized disclosure. This information includes software designs and source code. The contract requirements also mandate that Sifers-Grayson report cyber incidents to the federal government in a timely manner.
The company has agreed to allow an external Red Team to conduct penetration testing of its operations to help ensure that it is able to meet the government’s requirements for cybersecurity and the protection of government owned sensitive but unclassified information. The company has also assigned personnel to conduct After Action Reviews of the penetration testing. You
Company Operations
ENGINEERING DEPARTMENT
The Engineering Department is housed in the company’s R&D center with a satellite facility at the test range. The desktop and laptop computers are a mixed bag of hardware (multiple manufacturers) running Windows 8.1, Windows 10, and variants of Apple’s OSX and iOS. The support for these computers and the internal networks is provided by the junior engineers assigned to one or more of the department’s development teams. The Engineering Department’s philosophy is that all of the company’s engineers should be trained and capable of providing support for any and all hardware, software, and networks used by the department. This training is provided through on-the-job experiences and mentoring by more senior engineers. When a problem arises, the department head or one of the lab supervisors assigns an engineer to find and fix the problem.
ENGINEERING DEPARTMENT: SCADA LAB
The SCADA lab was originally setup in 1974. It has been upgraded and rehabbed several times since then. The most recent hardware and software upgrades were completed three years ago after the lab was hit with a ransomware attack that exploited several Windows XP vulnerabilities. At that time, the engineering and design workstations were upgraded to Windows 8.1 professional. A second successful ransomware attack occurred three months ago. The company paid the ransom in both cases because the lab did not have file backups that it could use to recover the damaged files (in the first case) and did not have system backups that it could use to rebuild the system hard drives (in the second case).
The SCADA Lab is locked into using Windows 8.1. The planned transition to Windows 10 is on indefinite hold due to technical problems encountered during previous attempts to modify required software applications to work under the new version of the operating system. This means that an incident response and recovery capability for the lab must support the Windows 8.1 operating system and its utilities.