A Brief Summary Of The Home Depot Attack

In December of 2013, target corporation faced a serious security breach where over 40 million credit cards were stolen from different target stores. This paper is going to explore the problem, the background information about the problem, the controls that could have been in place to prevent the issue, the intended plan of control and the associated risks involved.

What do Premara Blue Cross, Anthem, Chick-fil-A, Sony, USPS, MCX, Staples, Kmart, Dairy Queen, SuperValue, Jimmie John's, Viator, Home Depot, PF Chang's, Community Health Systems, and JP Morgan all have in common? Each of these companies were hacked during 2014-2015. Sadly, this is just a short list showing the breadth of industries and size of operations that are vulnerable. According to Time Magazine in March, 2015, "You're not just imagining it: Lately, a new data breach has been reported almost every week."

A direct cyberattack in 2014 to JPMorgan Chase caused a compromised of accounts effecting a total of 76 million households and seven million small businesses. We are clearly, in times when consumer confidence in the digital operations of corporate America is on shaky ground. In directly, banking is taking the brunt of the fallout but major stores also have breaches which of course are directly related to their financial data. Store like, Target, Home Depot and a number of other retailers have experienced major data breaches. 40 million cardholders and 70 million others were compromised at Target alone in 2013 and an attack at Home Depot in September, 2013 affected 56 million cardholders.

This paper explores seven references that report the results from research conducted on-line regarding the 2013 Target breach. According to the website “Timeline of Target 's Data Breach And Aftermath: How Cybertheft Snowballed For The Giant Retailer” (2015), the breach occurred November and December 2013 in which customers who shopped at Target locations credit and debit cards were breached and their personal information was exposed. Upon their investigation, it was determined their point of sale system was hacked. “Wikipedia” states point of sale system which is used by third party vendors has cash registers as well as barcodes which stores customer’s information. The website “What is Packet Sniffer” (2016), Packet Sniffing may have been a way the attacked happened. “RAM Scraping Attack” website indicates what RAM means and how this type of attack happens. “What is a Firewall in Networking and How They Protect Your Computers” (2014), “What is Endpoint Security? Data Protection 101” and “Why SSL? The Purpose of using SSL Certificates” websites each provide ways to reduce and/or prevent future attacks.

Every good company will have checks and balances in place to prevent or stop mistakes from happening. The Target company had all the industry standard security technology and had also installed a malware detection tools a few months before the breach occurred. Human error was the main fault of Target being able to be breached. Target’s management and security team both failed to respond to system warnings of malware that has been detected.

The cause of this data leak was a well-executed plan of attack by using and exfiltration malware program that moved customer’s stolen credit card numbers and details into drop locations and then the hackers retrieved the data from these locations spread all over the US. However despite FireEye (Targets $1.6 million malware detection tool) spotting this malware and notified the security team as says *** “Nothing happened”. This non-responsive action to the 11GB worth of data being leaked from their mainframes. As a result of this Target experienced more than 140 lawsuits filed towards them by customers and banks due this negligence and compensatory damages. The total costs exceeding $61 million responding to the breach and Targets profit during the Christmas period had fell 46%. Target was not the only victim to this data breach it caused banks to refund customers more than $200 million due to their stolen money by these hackers. Furthermore many customers were experiencing identity theft, this being a major implication for all individuals affected this data breach as now many customers will need new credit card details and identity to be fixed by this data

30 and more from Dec. 2, when hackers installed yet another version of the malware.’’ “...For some reason, Minneapolis didn’t react to the sirens.” (Ben Elgin)Second, Target refused to immediately address any questions or put out any statement after the situation which only worried its consumers and investors more and worsen the situation. Also Earlier statement of the breach could have lessen the damage to the corporate image. The decision to admit and confront its negligence and failure versus secretly trying to fix the problem is a critical one.

From November 27 to December 15, 2013 Target Corporation released 70 million customers’ personal information. On average, it takes companies 200 days to uncover they are being hacked (Lunden, 2015). It only took Target 12 days to figure out the crisis that began happening. On December 19, Target originally said only 40 million credit and debit card accounts may have been compromised during Black Friday weekend to December 15. “The information stolen included customer names, credit or debit card number, and the card’s expiration date and CVV” (McGrath, 2014). Although Target never clarified how they were hacked, security experts say that hackers targeted their POS system. “Target spent $61 million through Feb. 1 responding to the breach, according

Aside from the Playstation Outage, there had been larger and more nefarious data breaches in history that exploited weaknesses in internet, server, and network security. One such breach is when Heartland Payment Systems had, what was called, the most massive credit card security breach in history, with hackers embedding deep into Heartland security and recording card data. According to Bloomberg Business, it was estimated that “as many as 100 million cards issued by more than 650 financial services companies may have been compromised”. The attack cost Heartland $12.6 million, which was orchestrated by a man named Albert Gonzalez, who was also the cause for several other data breaches, each costing from thousands to millions of dollars. Another such attack was when Russian, and a Ukrainian, computer hackers assaulted NASDAQ stock exchange servers and stealing “more than 160 million credit and debit card numbers, target more than 800,000 bank accounts” (NY Daily News). Separate hacking operation spanned over seven years, attacking NASDAQ, but also affected “chains like 7-Eleven”. All the operations, in the period of time and the global scale it spanned, resulted “in at least $300 million in losses to companies and individuals”. One of the latest, and possibly the largest, data breaches of 2015, Anthem, the second largest health insurer in the US was hacked, compromising millions of account and personal data, as well as social security. When Anthem discovered that they had been

Recently with Target and General Motors is having to deal with the public opinion of doubt in part due to security risks and quality of product. Target has had a well-publicized security breach where customers sensitive information was made available. This obviously will have a negative effect on consumer confidence. It goes without saying in today’s market place and number of choices a person has to purchase a product to include E-commerce, network security is a must. Online market places advertise the use of third party secure payment with trusted names such as PayPal. With a brick and mortar store front, it is assumed or not even considered to be a risk by some. Target has stayed somewhat silent, it seems they are just

One of the largest issues with this data breach is, just six months prior, Target had installed “a $1.6 million malware detection tool made by the computer security firm FireEye (FEYE), whose customers also include the CIA and the Pentagon” (Riley, Elgin, Lawrence, & Matlack, 2014). The problem was not the software, it was a lack of reaction by Target’s security team located in Minneapolis. Once the credit card and personal information was stored, the hackers moved the information to various locations throughout the U.S. before sending the data to their computers in Russia. On December 12, 2013, Federal investigators notified Target of a massive data breach; and on December 15, 2013, Target confirmed and eradicated the malware, after all of the credit card and personal information had been stolen.

In December 2013, Target was attacked by a cyber-attack due to a data breach. Target is a widely known retailer that has millions of consumers flocking every day to the retailer to partake in the stores wonders. The Target Data Breach is now known as the largest data breach/attack surpassing the TJX data breach in 2007. “The second-biggest attack struck TJX Companies, the parent company of TJMaxx and Marshall’s, which said in 2007 that about 45 million credit cards and debit cards had been compromised.” (Timberg, Yang, & Tsukayama, 2013) The data breach occurred to Target was a strong swift kick to the guts to not only the retailer/corporation, but to employees and consumers. The December 2013 data breach, exposed Target in a way that many

The Target data breach remains one of the most notable breaches in history, it was the first time a CEO of a major corporation was fired due to a security event. The breach received an enormous amount of attention, it caused corporations and individuals to change the way they think about information security and data protection. Between Thanksgiving and Christmas 2013 hackers gained access to 40 million customer credit cards and personal data of 70 million Target customers. The intruders slipped in by using stolen credentials and from there gained access to vulnerable servers on Targets network to launch their attack and steal sensitive customer data from the POS cash registers. All this occurred without a response from Targets security operations center, even though security systems notified them of suspicious activity. The data was then sold on the black market for an estimated $53 million dollars. However, the cost to Target, creditors, and banks exceeded half of a billion dollars. This report will review how the infiltration occurred, what allowed the breach to occur including Targets response, and finally who was impacted by the security event.

The second security breach case is of Barnes & Noble. In September 2012, hackers stole credit card information of customers who shopped at sixty-three Barnes & Noble stores across the United States, which included New York City, San Diego, Miami and Chicago. The company discovered customer information had been stolen but kept the incident quiet per the request of the Justice Department so the F.B.I. could find out who was behind the intrusion (Huffington Post, 2012).

In December 2013 criminals forced their way into Target’s system and gained access to customer credit and debit card information. This was one of the largest data breaches in U.S. history. Target lost over 40 million credit and debit card numbers to the hackers. As the investigation moved forward, Target announced an additional 70 million customer accounts were stolen that included names, emails, addresses, phone numbers and so on. The customer’s affected were those who had shopped at U.S. Target stores between November 27 and December 15 (holiday shopping season). As a result of this attack, Target partnered with a top forensic firm who thoroughly investigated the breach. The hackers got their hands on everything (except social security numbers), and with all of that information they would be able to make card replicas. Some customers even claimed that there were unauthorized ATM withdrawals from their accounts after the attack.