This week I continued working towards Assessment 2. Based on the feedback received from Assessment 1, I will reduce / combined my list of questions to focus on when doing research on my project.

I started categorising the journal articles I’ve found so far by sub-topic so that there is a sufficient amount of literature to address the project questions when preparing the annotated bibliography’s for Assessment 3.

This week I submitted Assessment 1 and started working on Assessment 2. I looked at the objectives of Assessment 4 and started working backwards on how to best approach Assessment 3 and 4. I wrote some sub-areas of the project topic to give me some ideas of the search terms I should be looking up to help with the later assessment. I also did some reading on what a WBS chart was and put one together using Microsoft Visio.

This week I mapped out the milestone events for the project and blog articles in the form of a GANTT chart. I colour coded each assessment with its own colour, then used a single colour to show the blog articles. I plan to take a mid session break and have allowed time for that in the schedule. I may continue to work on A3 during the break, but if don’t, I have still allowed plenty of time before and after the break. The break is colour coded red.

My name is James Dewick and I have been an IT and Cyber Security Consultant since 2004.  I am currently studying my final capstone subject of my Masters degree in Cyber Security.

In my years of experience as an IT consultant, I’ve observed that IP based telephony systems that co-exist alongside other corporate IT infrastructure, is often a neglected area when evaluating cyber security risk.

VoIP systems are in a transition phase from moving away from physical desk handsets to softphone technology which is making it truly mobile. This emerging area of IT has been used extensively throughout the pandemic and adoption rates are growing exponentially.

Due to the mainstream uptake in this technology, I feel it may be subjected to more sophisticated cyber-attacks in the coming years. I would like to explore the underlying vulnerabilities associated with IP telephony, as well as determine the controls that can be used to mitigate these threats.

Since I actively work in the IT Industry and frequently come across IP based technology, my Project is going to be a Cyber Security risk assessment of IP based technology in commercial environments.