Security Risks And Recommendations For Atlassian Corporation Plc

Overview of Atlassian Corporation Plc

Atlassian Corporation Plc is an enterprise software company situated in Australia. It creates products for content management, project managers and software developers. Thus it has been providing information systems to its customers and staffs (“Atlassian | Software Development and Collaboration Tools”, 2018).  

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The aim of the report is to identify common malware and various threads against Atlassian’s information system, identification of different networking devices, availability and reliability of web services. It also analyzes methods assuring integrity and confidentiality of staff emails and prioritization of threats and kinds of security and malware issues related to web servers and webmails.

Adware

 This malware delivers advertisements automatically.

Bot

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 This threat is a software program for performing particular operations automatically.

Spyware

 This functions through spying on user activities instead of any knowledge.

Worm

 This threat is spread around computer networks through exploiting vulnerabilities of operating systems.

Trojan Horse

 This disguises as a regular program or file for tricking users to install and download software. It provides remote access to infected computers (DeAngelo & Stulz, 2015).

The first one is Network Interface Card (NIC), which is very much important for networking. This is helpful for computers for creating communications with others. The next one is a hub which is used for connecting various computers under a single workgroup LAN network (McNeil, Frey & Embrechts, 2015). The next one is a bridge which is used for improving performances where the networks are divided into smaller segments. It is used for dividing huge networks into smaller segments. The next one is the brouters which are the combination of bridges and routers. Next, the gateways must be used effectively to forward packets needed for the remote network from various local networks.

Atlassian has needed a quality aspect whether Web services has existed or has been ready for immediate usage as per as the availability is concerned. This is helpful to represent the probability that any service has been available. The higher values have been representing that this service has always been ready to utilize smaller values indicating unpredictability. This uncertainty is whether the service has been available at a specific point of time (Aven, 2016).

For reliability, Atlassian must assure the quality element of the web services representing degree being able to contain service and quality of services. Here, the number of failures every month per year has been representing measures of the reliability of web service. Stating in other rods, the reliability has been denoting to ordered and assured delivery of messages that are being sent and received and to the service providers (Soomro, Shah & Ahmed, 2016).

Confidentiality:

For assuring confidentiality has been roughly equivalent privacy. Here the measures have been undertaken for ensuring confidentiality has been effectively designed to prevent various sensitive data from reaching to the wrong people.     This is also helpful to assure those suitable individuals can get access to it. Here, the access should be limited to various authorized people for seeing the data under query (Rittinghouse & Ransome, 2016). Further, it has been common for information to get categorized as per the amount. This has also included the  kind of damage that might be done to get fall towards unintended hands. Moreover, stringent measures can also be implemented as per those categories.

Common Malware and Various Threats

This includes maintenance of trustworthiness, the accuracy and the consistency of data over the complete life-cycle. Furthermore, here, the data should be changed according to transit and the steps should be undertaken to assure that the  information cannot be changed by different kinds of unauthorized people like the case of confidentiality. Further, the measures have been including user access controls and file permissions. The version controls have been sued for preventing mistaken changes and accidental deletion of authorized individuals from becoming a problem (Webb et al., 2014). Moreover, there has been various means that must be in place to find different changes in the data. This can occur as the results of different types of events that are caused by non-human like EMP or electromagnetic pulse or crashes in servers. Further, there are some data that includes checksums and cryptographic checksums in verify integrity. Further, the redundancies or backups should also be available. This is to restore the various affected data towards the proper state.

A threat of data leakage:

Receiving personal data has been one of the primary targets of the hackers. As email is sent through Internet, it undergoes through unprotected channels of communications. Thus messages, usernames and passwords can be intercepted (Oppliger, 2015).

Threats of malware:

Email clients and servers are susceptible to malware. As any email servers get infected, the stability of the entire system gets compromised. Here, privacy and integrity of personal data have been falling under threats. The malware are spread among various email clients because of infected attachments.

DoS threat:

Here the damages done by DoS attack have been hard to overstate. Further, it is unsent and received emails ultimately harming the overall company.

Using cloud services:

The scaling quality of cloud servers has been effective and it has been easy and quick to incorporate every update. This is done to cloud servers since it has been more affordable. One can integrate various applications under one cloud. Further, it has been faster and easier to sign up for cloud servers than running over web servers.

 

Figure 1: “Conceptual Framework Modelling for Cloud”

(Source:Top 5 Risks of Cloud Computing”, 2018)

Search engines:

Every big search engines have been able to track search history and create profiles over servers of personalized results by search history. As Atlassian needs to escape from the “filter bubble”, they require switching to search engine that never tracks various inquiries.

Reliability of Web Services

Figure 2: “Project risks – good and bad practice for search engines”

(Source: “Example project risks: real examples of bad & best practices”, 2018 )

The organizational issues: 

There has been lack of decision making structure at Atlassian with lack of accountability regarding risk decisions at the company.

There has been lack of needed risk analysis processes. Atlassian needs to consider risk management that is needed to do from compliance standpoints conducting a superficial risk analysis (Nazareth & Choi, 2015).

Human factors: 

As Atlassian, has been addressing human factors, they mainly denote health and safety to optimizing human performances and decreasing human failures.

Use of logs records:

While writing log records, the logging services verify that the logging requester gets the sufficient authority to log and write data to a configured location. This is to complete and format columns in log records.

Issues and securities:

The attackers have been able to use information that is not validated prior used by web applications to reach various backend components.

Events in monitoring and analyzing:

The analyses of various risks are to be done on identified values. This required the proper situation to deliver sufficient information regarding decision making. Here, the guidance is provided with both through quantitative and qualitative methods (Eriksson, 2017).

For Atlassian, files and networks are needed to be accessed and changes must be made to system configurations. Further, they must use system utilities and exceptions and various other security-related events like alarms triggered. They must activate protection systems like antimalware and detection systems. A collection of data has been assisting in access control monitoring and provides audits trails while analyzing any incident. As most of the logs are covered by various kinds of regulations, they must be kept long as the requirements have been calling for in case they are required for investigation.

Anti-Malware:

This network tool help administrators to remove, block and identify malware. They have been helping IT departments for tailoring anti-malware policies for identifying different unknown and known malware sources like surveil particular groups and users.

Mobile device management:

This software has been bolstering network securities through various distant controls and monitoring of patch pushes, policy enforcement, controlling security configurations to different mobile devices.

Network access controls:

The NAC products have been enforcing policies of security through granting through security policies and compliant to various devices accessing to different network resources.

Next-generation firewalls:

It provides next-generation security services, application visibility and essential web securities

Authorization and authentication:

This includes conventional directory-based services like authenticating users, active directories and granting access by authorization rules (“How to Prevent Malware from Affecting Network Security | White Rock Security Group”, 2018).

Conclusion: 

The above study shows that security risk management has been a vital factor and concern for Atlassian. The research is useful for both external and internal risks. There are many IR risk options for Atlassian that must be mitigated. Otherwise, that can lead to detrimental problems as they are handled with proper care.

The various recommendations for Atlassian for the present scenario are listed below.

  • Installing antivirus software and keeping all the software patched.
  • Using strong patched for all the sites and applications that are used.
  • Spotting social engineering attempts
  • Using secured Wi-Fi connections
  • Keeping back up of vital data
  • Limiting social network data
  • Downloading a file through legal processes
  • Obtaining the various areas before leaving that unattended.

References:

Atlassian | Software Development and Collaboration Tools. (2018). Retrieved from https://www.atlassian.com/

Aven, T. (2016). Risk assessment and risk management: Review of recent advances on their foundation. European Journal of Operational Research, 253(1), 1-13.

DeAngelo, H., & Stulz, R. M. (2015). Liquid-claim production, risk management, and bank capital structure: Why high leverage is optimal for banks. Journal of Financial Economics, 116(2), 219-236.

Eriksson, J. (Ed.). (2017). Threat Politics: New Perspectives on Security, Risk and Crisis Management: New Perspectives on Security, Risk and Crisis Management. Routledge.

Example project risks: real examples of bad & best practices. (2018). Retrieved from https://www.pmis-consulting.com/example-project-risks-good-and-bad-practice/

How to Prevent Malware from Affecting Network Security | White Rock Security Group. (2018). Retrieved from https://www.wrsecure.com/blog/how-to-prevent-malware-from-affecting-network-security/

McNeil, A. J., Frey, R., & Embrechts, P. (2015). Quantitative risk management: Concepts, techniques and tools. Princeton university press.

Nazareth, D. L., & Choi, J. (2015). A system dynamics model for information security management. Information & Management, 52(1), 123-134.

Olson, D. L., & Wu, D. D. (2017). Data Mining Models and Enterprise Risk Management. In Enterprise Risk Management Models (pp. 119-132). Springer, Berlin, Heidelberg.

Oppliger, R. (2015). Quantitative risk analysis in information security management: a modern fairy tale. IEEE Security & Privacy, 13(6), 18-21.

Rittinghouse, J. W., & Ransome, J. F. (2016). Cloud computing: implementation, management, and security. CRC press.

Soomro, Z. A., Shah, M. H., & Ahmed, J. (2016). Information security management needs more holistic approach: A literature review. International Journal of Information Management, 36(2), 215-225.

Top 5 Risks of Cloud Computing. (2018). Retrieved from https://www.calyptix.com/research-2/top-5-risks-of-cloud-computing/

Webb, J., Ahmad, A., Maynard, S. B., & Shanks, G. (2014). A situation awareness model for information security risk management. Computers & security, 44, 1-15