Operation Support: A Year in Review

2013 has been a successful year not only for TAW as a whole, but also for Operations Support. As some of you know, Operations Support consists of various units including our Website Development Team (OSD), TAW Treasury, Digital Media and News Team (OSM), and last but not least, Information Security (ISC). I would like to take the time to recognize all the accomplishments and hard work by the members of these groups over the past year. I am truly blessed to be able to work alongside many talented people within TAW.

For those who don't know, the Information Security team is primarily responsible the upkeep of TAW infrastructure including various system administration tasks involving: system security updates, OS and application patching, upgrades, security auditing, and responding to network threats. We do our best to ensure that TAW's critical services are up and running with little downtime. As a member of the Information Security group, I would like to reflect on some of our accomplishments in 2013 and also focus on some of our goals for the upcoming year.

Here are some of the accomplishments of ISC over the course of 2013:

• Successfully upgraded Teamspeak from version 3.0.7.1 to 3.0.10.1. This upgrade contained 9 months of bug fixes and supported the new Overwolf overlay.
• Upgraded the servers operating system with the latest updates and security patches as per manufacturer recommendations -Performed audit of TAW's e-mail server settings and made adjustments / tweaks to ensure best practices and RFC compliance.
• Performed security audit of TAW's Web/TS server and implemented additional security measures to ensure that our services have better protection against intruders.
• Responded to and mitigated Denial of Service attacks on our infrastructure

2014 brings us a window of opportunity to make additional improvements.

Here are some of ISC's Future Goals for the new year:

• Expand our infrastructure to allow for high availability in our applications and services. Our goal is to reduce the risk of single points of failure in our environment.
• Implement various monitoring techniques and reporting metrics to allow our administrators to analyze system and network resources and utilization. Our ability to analyze and anticipate trends in our system/network activity will allow us to have a more proactive criteria in addressing threats to our security, and to analyze future growth
• Keep current with server and teamspeak updates
• Focus on keeping a 99% up time for our teamspeak and web services
• Keep active communication with our members regarding any planned downtimes, or unplanned outage events affecting connectivity or change of user experience
• Update our security awareness test and add an additional advanced security awareness test and badges

I am pleased to see our success over the course of the year and can't wait to see what is achieved in 2014. Please assist me in thanking all of our membership for their contributions and support. I am excited for the upcoming new year as we all work towards our 2014 strategic goals and focus on providing our community with the best gaming services.

Happy new year!

Regards,

Lieutenant Colonel Juvix

Division Commander

Operations Support - Information Security