Networking Security Cmgt440

The Mc Bride Financial Services provides loans to people for mortgages, credit reports, home inspections and appraisals. In order for an individual to apply for a loan, the McBride Financial Services has an available loan application for them to fill out over the internet.

The security of allowing the loans to be filled out over the internet is of vital importance. The consumer trust McBride Financial Services to secure their personal information and prevent their information from being stolen. Stolen information could lead to identity thief. The thief could use the victim’s personal information to obtain credit elsewhere thus causing the potential to ruin the person’s credit.

Another aspect of the securing the information, is to block hackers from obtaining information for their own objectives. Hackers could have the potential to use the information given within the loan application to send out fraudulent e-mails with viruses attached. These e-mails could be viewed as coming from McBride Financial Services and therefore would be blamed for the viruses that have infected all of their customer’s computers.

Another need for security in this area is to protect McBride Financial Services from outside hazards. These hazards could be viruses, worms or Trojan horses. Any of these hazards has the potential to bring down the McBride Financial Services internal network. If this were to happen, the business may loose customers due to the inability to access their information or possibly even view the web page itself. Employees of McBride Financial Services would also become frustrated with their internal system due to the functionality of the system being slower. The risk of spreading the virus or worm internally and with customers is high if the system has already been infected.

All of these security issues need to be taken into consideration when providing the customer with an online application for them to fill out to request services. These items need to be secured in order to protect the customer, the business and the services.

To resolve these issues, I would recommend several items both hardware and software. Alone each of these items may be able to protect portions of the network, however together they will be able to protect the entire network at McBride Financial Services.

The first thing I recommend setting up is a Demilitarized Zone (DMZ). A DMZ will isolate the server used for the loan applications from the remainder of the internal network.