ACC539 Information Systems: Outbreak of the Ransom Ware Attack

Introduction

Ransom ware virus had recently started a worldwide chaotic outbreak in May of 2017. The warehouse drawbacks and the recommendation for the threats and the ransom ware attacks on how to combat them have compiled in this report for the CFO of Motherboards and More Pty Ltd also discussing about the revenue cycle that is being followed.

Overview of the revenue cycle 

The organization, Motherboards, and More Pty Ltd is a medium size organization, which produces motherboards, microchips, repairing procedures and graphics cards for the continent of Australia. The organization has its offices in the central city building and the other departments are situated in the outskirts of Australia (Wells & Bravender, 2016). The revenue cycle of the company follows a pattern discussed as follows:

The customer after visiting the website of the organization searches for the product, which he or she wishes to buy. After choosing the product, the customer requests for the product to be delivered. The orders are completed on a credit basis. The orders are placed and invoices are created which is then forwarded to the warehouse for the completion of the procedure (Harris & Kaplan, 2015). The invoices are checked in an alphabetical manner and the orders come in from twenty different sources ant the outgoing deliveries are more than that. When an item is found to be missing in the warehouse the workers log the information in a logbook along with the tag and the inventory record is updated. The item once lout for the customer can track delivery (Sittig & Singh, 2016). Once the item has been delivered to the customer the review and the company, which would help the other customers visiting the website to learn about the quality of the products, takes the feedback.

Figure 1: level 0 data flow diagram

(Source: Created By Author)

Threat identification

The table provided below discusses about the threats and drawbacks, which the organization faces in terms of its revenue cycle evaluation:

Ransom ware - attack overview

The recent attack of the ransom ware attack was initiated in the month of May of 2017. The virus had started to encrypt the files and folders in the computers. The files would only be decrypted if the user paid the ransom money to the creators of the virus (Kharraz et al., 2015). The virus was self-replicating in nature. It would initiating its working procedure when the affected person opened a malicious email. The virus would start to encrypt the files on the computer and ask for a ransom money starting from US$300. The ransom would increase from time to time. The attack was successful due to the security holes present in the windows operating system. When the Microsoft officials were asked about the security holes, they said that they had found the drawbacks from long ago and had published the respective updates for them. Majority of the users had switched the updates option of the windows center off which made the updates not to reach the computers (Collier, 2017). Moreover, many of the computers affected were using an obsolete version of the windows operating system (Mohurle & Patil, 2017). The highest casualty level was in the hospitals and clinics in England. The ransom exorcists were able to extort a total amount of $57,000 from 99 counties.

Appropriate controlling measures

The best appropriate measures that could be taken up by the organization would be to install an effective antivirus along with an anti ransom ware virus software. The software would be able to determine any kind of ransom ware attack on the system and stop the virus from initiating the attack (Gupta & Tripathi, 2017). Keeping a backup of all the data that is essential for the company should be kept safe in a remote located server. The mails, which come into the system, should be checked before opening then or clicking on the links that might redirect the user to a location on the internet from where the virus would be downloaded into the system. The main problem due to which the attack was initiated was not installing the latest updates. The computer of the company should always be kept up to date at all times (Pope, 2016).

Conclusion

To conclude this report, it can be said that the recent attack of the ransom ware attack has produced many loss in terms of financial as well as from the information point of view. The study of the organization, Motherboards and More Pty Ltd has provided a detailed report of the drawbacks in the warehouse of the organization and the recommendation for the ransom ware attack.

Recommendation

From the above report, it can be said that the basic drawback of the warehouse is the inability of the company to keep a track of the items that it has in store. This can be overcome by the use of appropriate tagging system and along with a daily monitoring system, which would compare the stock items with the inventory list. Tagging the items with an electronic tag would help the warehouse officials are notified when an item is being taken out of the location without the officials knowing.

References

Collier, R. (2017). NHS ransom ware attack spreads worldwide.

Gupta, G., & Tripathi, K. (2017). STUDY ON RANSOM WARE ATTACK AND ITS PREVENTION. International Education and Research Journal, 3(5).

Harris, M. T., & Kaplan, D. (2015). The Revenue Cycle. In The Complete Business Guide for a Successful Medical Practice (pp. 107-119). Springer International Publishing.

Kharraz, A., Robertson, W., Balzarotti, D., Bilge, L., & Kirda, E. (2015, July). Cutting the gordian knot: A look under the hood of ransom ware attacks. In International Conference on Detection of Intrusions and Malware, and Vulnerability Assessment (pp. 3-24). Springer, Cham.

Mohurle, S., & Patil, M. (2017). A brief study of Wannacry Threat: Ransom ware Attack 2017. International Journal, 8(5).

Pope, J. (2016). Ransom ware: Minimizing the Risks. Innovations in clinical neuroscience, 13(11-12), 37.

Sittig, D. F., & Singh, H. (2016). A socio-technical approach to preventing, mitigating, and recovering from ransom ware attacks. Applied clinical informatics, 7(2), 624.

Wells, S. T., & Bravender, R. (2016). Improving employee engagement in the revenue cycle. Healthcare Financial Management, 70(10), 36-39.