Impact of Advanced Persistent Threat on Energy Australia: Analysis

This project examines the impact of an Advanced Persistent Threat (APT) on Energy Australia, detailing the threat's nature, effects, and potential solutions. The assignment includes a brief for the business manager explaining the APT's characteristics, the ways it infiltrates networks, and the financial and reputational damages it inflicts. It also outlines the impact on IT colleagues, highlighting the necessary changes in their roles to address the threat, and how they need to focus on pre-installed system tools and the overall organisational network. Additionally, the project provides web content for users, explaining the APT in accessible terms and suggesting precautions and solutions. The author reflects on the challenges faced during the task, including identifying the threat, communicating complex information to non-IT personnel, and drafting user-friendly web content. References from academic sources support the analysis and proposed solutions.

PORTFOLIO

TABLE OF CONTENTS
Brief for the business manager........................................................................................................1
Email for IT colleagues....................................................................................................................2
Web content for users......................................................................................................................2
Reflect on considerations and challenges faced to complete the task.............................................3
REFERENCES................................................................................................................................4

Brief for the business manager
Advance persistent threat is an advance computer network threat in which a certain group
of people gains an unauthorised access to the network and affects system or data of various
organisations and remain undetected for an uncertain period (Xiao and et.al., 2017). It is quite
dangerous as it can infiltrate whole network, affect the systems and documents of many
organisations. In Australia as well Advance persistent threat actor are trying to infiltrate their
network this is affecting Business security and development branch of Energy Australia in many
ways. Due to this threat most of the sensitive information are being affected both temporarily and
permanently, various kinds of regular operations of the company are also being affected as well.
Many files and folders are either affected or deleted due to this threat and as a result most of the
sensitive and secretive information of the organisation is getting affected and as a result
organisation is facing many financial losses as most of the regular operations are affected and
restoration of complete system and files is also affecting the overall financial condition of the
company. Due to all of these factors complete reputation of the company is being affected as the
security system of the organisation has failed to protect complete system and all the secretive and
sensitive data or information of the company for this Advance persistent threat. Energy Australia
uses Cisco equipments but still they failed to understand US-CERT alert which increased
potential threats for the company as a result organisation failed to understand all the potential
risks associated with this Advance persistent threat and the ways it can affect the operations of
the company at a certain level (Betz, 2017).
As a result, the overall system and operations of the company are being affected as the
company failed to detect all the malicious activities that were going on in the system and failed
to respond appropriately. Due to this incident it has come into notice that the incident response
plan of the company was not that efficient enough to tackle such situation and protect all the
sensitive data of the organisations. It has also come into notice that due to this Advance
persistent threat the overall network of the organisations has also been affected and due to which
they are facing lots of difficulties in communicating, transferring the data or information from
one source to another. Both in and out communication lines were also affected and as a result
both internal and external relationship of the company with their stakeholders such as clients,
employees etc. was affected drastically. It has been identified that finance required to repair the
network infrastructure, communication system, repair all the damaged and lost files, restore all
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the sensitive information and strengthen the overall security system of the organisations as well
as improving the incident response plan of the organisation will take and increase the overall
financial budget required. The is the current overall situation of the organisation which has been
created due to Advance persistent threat.
Email for IT colleagues
Due to this Advance persistent threat situation throughout the organisation has changed
and has impacted the overall organisation in different ways. Due to this there will be lots of
changes in the roles of all the IT department colleagues. They need to focus and work on pre
installed system tools like command script as it has been affected and as a result all the remote
system cannot be accessed and the administration is failing to discover and address all the
accounts (Friedberg and et.al., 2015). They also need to work on the overall organisational
network as the company is facing lots of difficulties in both internal and external
communication. All the network security functions, data security functions, third party security
system etc. are also affected. So, the IT team need to first of all work on all those systems. They
also need to restore all the damaged and lost sensitive informations it is affecting the overall
operations of the company. After working on all these informations they need to work on US-
CERT alerts so that if any such situation in future arises then the Energy Australia can
understand all the potential threats and can start working on it initially only so that this level of
damage can be prevented.
Web content for users
Advance persistent threat can be defined as a broad therm that is used to describe
network attack that gives and intruder an unauthorised access to the network and affects the
highly sensitive data present on that network by remaining undetected. The main purpose of such
attackers is to plant malicious codes on various system and affect the files, sensitive data related
to it and gain unauthorised access to the system (Jepson and Law, 2016). These attackers can
attack and control the system for indefinite time period. If these attackers are not detected on
time then it can increase the risk factor and the overall threats to the organisation.
It impacts the organisation in various ways as it can destroy all the sensitive information
or content of the organisation. Due to this sometimes these sensitive files can be temporary or
permanently lost. It also affects all the regular operations of the company in various ways, it also
affects the overall communication network of an organisations both internally and externally due
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to which communication between both internal and external stakeholders of the company
becomes difficult. Not only this due to all these things restoration of the system security,
restoration of the files or data becomes difficult for the company and the later this threat is
detected destruction is that greater.
There are various precautions and solutions that can be taken by the organisation to avoid
such circumstances created by this threat such as: Organisation can built a threat detection and
identification system that can rapidly identify any kind of such threats and can response
accurately, this system will be effective enough to detected any kind of malicious activity that is
going on in the system (Marchetti and et.al., 2016). This will also help the organisation to
strengthen their indecent response system which will help in responding to the system according
to the malicious activity or threat that is going on in the system. All the network and data
security system should be connected to this incident response system so that no data, files or
internal communication of the company is affected.
Reflect on considerations and challenges faced to complete the task
There were various challenges and considerations that were faced by me in completion of
this task. As first challenge was to identify all the threats, damage to the system and current
situation of Business Security and Development branch of Energy Australia i.e. how deeply this
Advanced Persistent Threat has affect the networks of global managed service providers and the
organisation. After identifying all these factors another difficulty was to explain this current
situation to the business manager as she is not an IT specialist. Then another challenge was to
explain the role of all the IT department colleagues their roles and duties that they need to fulfil.
Not only this there were many consideration that were needed to be done such as till what extent
sensitive information of the organisation was damaged and how many of them were temporarily
or permanently damaged and how they can be repaired. All of these challenges and
considerations were faced by me in completion of this tasks. Lastly, the biggest challenge was to
draft a web content for the relevant users. It was challenging because I needed to think of what
content should be published and shouldn't be.
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REFERENCES
Books and Journals
Betz, D.J., 2017. Cyberspace and the State: Towards a Strategy for Cyber-power. Routledge.
Friedberg, I., and et.al., 2015. Combating advanced persistent threats: From network event
correlation to incident detection. Computers & Security. 48. pp.35-57.
Jepson, P.D. and Law, R.J., 2016. Persistent pollutants, persistent threats. Science. 352(6292).
pp.1388-1389.
Marchetti, M., and et.al., 2016. Analysis of high volumes of network traffic for advanced
persistent threat detection. Computer Networks. 109. pp.127-141.
Xiao, L., and et.al., 2017. Cloud storage defense against advanced persistent threats: A prospect
theoretic study. IEEE Journal on Selected Areas in Communications. 35(3). pp.534-544.
Online
US-CERT. 2018. [Online]. Available through: <https://www.us-cert.gov/ncas/alerts/TA18-
276B>
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