Cybersecurity

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.

Cybersecurity Case:
This is the case topic: Magellan Health Data Breach (2020)
One example of a source of the topic: Magellan Health Data Breach Victim Tally Reaches 365K Patients (healthitsecurity.com)

Instructions:
Conduct research to capture the organization’s (Magellan Health) infrastructure and processes and the threats to personal health information (PHI) and to determine a strategy to mitigate the threats you anticipate. This research will go into the technical report that is due at a later time. Below is an outline for the technical report, the only thing that is due this week is to find good sources and research for all of the sections below.

Title of Project

This introductory section should provide basic information about the breach, what was compromised or damaged, and what the project will cover to arrive at your conclusion about this situation. It should consist of two or three focused paragraphs.

Organizational Profile for [Organization]
This should include:
• a short introduction (about three sentences),
• a description and diagram of the organization and its critical missions, and
• information security needs to protect those critical missions.

Analysis of Threats to the Organization’s Information Systems
This section includes:
• a short introduction (about three sentences),
• a description of potential threats and vulnerabilities, and
• risks to the CIA triad.

Proposed Mitigation Strategy
This section includes:
• a short introduction (about three sentences);
• your proposed identity management system;
• managing roles, accesses, restrictions, and conditions; and
• unknown risks and costs.