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The Journal of Supercomputing

, Volume 74, Issue 10, pp 5171–5186 | Cite as

A security review of local government using NIST CSF: a case study

  • Ahmed Ibrahim
  • Craig Valli
  • Ian McAteer
  • Junaid Chaudhry
Article
First Online:

Abstract

Evaluating cyber security risk is a challenging task regardless of an organisation’s nature of business or size, however, an essential activity. This paper uses the National Institute of Standards and Technology (NIST) cyber security framework (CSF) to assess the cyber security posture of a local government organisation in Western Australia. Our approach enabled the quantification of risks for specific NIST CSF core functions and respective categories and allowed making recommendations to address the gaps discovered to attain the desired level of compliance. This has led the organisation to strategically target areas related to their people, processes, and technologies, thus mitigating current and future threats.

Keywords

NIST cyber security framework Local government Cyber security Risk assessment 
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Notes

Acknowledgements

We would like to thank the Western Australia local government organisation for sharing their case study for this research. We would also like to thank their staff for their support and cooperation during the assessment.

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Copyright information

© Springer Science+Business Media, LLC, part of Springer Nature 2018

Authors and Affiliations

  1. 1.Security Research Institute, School of ScienceEdith Cowan UniversityPerthAustralia
  2. 2.College of Security and IntelligenceEmbry-Riddle Aeronautical UniversityPrescottUSA

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