Analysis of Disaster Recovery Plan for Qatar Petroleum Router Hack

This report details a disaster recovery plan for a hacked router within Qatar Petroleum. The plan emphasizes immediate actions, such as shutting down the compromised router and potentially all organization routers to prevent further data breaches. The network administrator and IT department are central to this response, focusing on identifying the root cause of the vulnerability, which is assumed to be outdated firmware. The plan includes upgrading firmware, advising employees to change sensitive credentials, and changing system login credentials. Furthermore, the report highlights the importance of updating router firmware regularly to prevent future attacks. The references provided support the importance of integrated business continuity, security, and disaster recovery planning in the face of cyber threats.

Running Head: DISASTER RECOVERY PLAN FOR A HACKED QATAR PETROLEUM ROUTER 1
Disaster Recovery Plan for a hacked Qatar Petroleum Router
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DISASTER RECOVERY PLAN FOR A HACKED QATAR PETROLEUM ROUTER 2
Routers in business organizations are in many ways more important than even the devices
being used in the organization. Although they may not store personal information directly,
sensitive data usually pass through them every time the devices connected to it are accessing
various online services and can be easily manipulated or stolen when hacked. Also,
compromised routers serve as platforms for attacking other devices in an organization's local
network like laptops and phones or launching denial of service attacks.
When it dawns that a certain router has been hacked within Qatar Petroleum Company,
the first person to be contacted should be the network administrator who is responsible for all the
networking devices of the organization (Sahebjamnia, Torabi & Mansouri, 2015). This paper
assumes that the hacker was targeting certain kind of information to be conveyed in the
organization network at a certain time and therefore the first course of action by the network
would be to shut down the compromised router so as not to allow the hacker obtain the
information if he or she had not gotten it.
Considering the uncertainty factor on whether there are other routers within the
organization which might have been compromised as well, the network administrator is expected
to work closely with the IT department to shut down all the routers within the organization. This
would cut off communication within the whole organization since reaching all the staff members
and other employees using the network might take a longer time (Sahi, Lai & Li, 2016). With an
assumption that the root cause of the vulnerability was the outdated firmware of the router, the
network administrator will be expected to facilitate firmware upgrade before the routers can be
restored back.

DISASTER RECOVERY PLAN FOR A HACKED QATAR PETROLEUM ROUTER 3
Also, organization workers will be advised to change their sensitive credentials like
passwords and credit card numbers which they might have shared through the network before
considering the fact that the time for the specific timeline for the attack will have not been saved
(Wallace & Webber, 2017). On the side of the organization, both the system administrator and
the network administrators will be expected to collaborate and ensure that organization system
login credentials are changed to avoid being compromised assuming that they had been stolen
before the incident was exposed.
Finally, to avoid the same incidents in future, the IT department will be expected to make
it a policy for the organization router firmware to be updated on regular basis in order to make it
hard for the hackers to penetrate into those devices (Yang, Yuan & Huang, 2015). This is based
on the assumption that the reason behind the vulnerability of the router was the outdated
firmware of the device.
References
Sahebjamnia, N., Torabi, S. A., & Mansouri, S. A. (2015). Integrated business continuity and
disaster recovery planning: Towards organizational resilience. European Journal of
Operational Research, 242(1), 261-273.
Sahi, A., Lai, D., & Li, Y. (2016). Security and privacy-preserving approach in the eHealth
clouds with disaster recovery plan. Computers in biology and medicine, 78, 1-8.

DISASTER RECOVERY PLAN FOR A HACKED QATAR PETROLEUM ROUTER 4
Wallace, M., & Webber, L. (2017). The disaster recovery handbook: A step-by-step plan to
ensure business continuity and protect vital operations, facilities, and assets. Amacom.
Yang, C. L., Yuan, B. J., & Huang, C. Y. (2015). Key determinant derivations for information
technology disaster recovery site selection by the multi-criterion decision-making
method. Sustainability, 7(5), 6149-6188.