A Summary Of Ashley Madison's Breach

Why(2) : Many of the users used weak passwords which can be easily guessed by the hackers. Weak security measures was also an important reason which inlcudes weak encryption of the passwords by using outdated techniques for encryption. Updated security tools and strong password encryption might have helped to prevent this attack.

However, some people trying to fix the attack did an adequate job considering the problems the company had. Joanne and Leon Ledbetter did everything in their power to restore the website and protect the customer data, which even included running red lights. Leon was so new that he didn’t know exactly what to do. Training for an emergency would have proven useful. The CIO, Bob Turley, knew of the emergency protocol and out of date manuals, but never did anything to alleviate these problems. This put the company in a significant disadvantage, and created a bigger problem than what was necessary. Faced with this problem, Turley was able to facilitate direction for the company as best as he could, which ended with the security breach stopping.

One of the other failures that the book presents us is the user’s weak password practice and how the intruder took advantage of this is to gain super user privileges and created several user accounts by gaining root privileges. All it takes is a one-time access as super user to establish his base into the defenders zone. This book describes how the intruder took advantage of brute force method to hack user accounts and password. Also, the intruder was smart enough to steal the password information file and even managed to encrypt all the dictionary words by using the same encryption algorithm and then compared those words with the stolen encrypted passwords file to find out passwords of user accounts. The scientists/ researchers at the laboratories who are not aware of such kind of exploitations made intruder’s work easy by having easy to guess passwords, never bothered to change the passwords from time to time or in fact did not realize the importance of having strong passwords in order to maintain and protect their research data in a safe and secure way. Even today, not all the users realize the importance of having strong/secure passwords and we come across such instances where intruders exploit users ignorance. (For example, Two years ago, before I enrolled in MS-CS program, I did not know how brute force attacks work or

A week after the last security breach, Sony announced to its PlayStation Network users that certain information may have been compromised. Many users were very upset because their personal and financial information had been compromised for over a week and they were unaware. There was a significant delay between when the card information was compromised and when Sony notified its users. Many users who did not give credit card information to Sony were still upset because they use the same login and password for multiple sites, and now their information on other sites may have been accessed without their knowledge. After the breaches, Sony did not just patch the holes in its network security, it had to rebuild from the ground up, further upsetting users by causing the network to be

A1. The Nature of the incident was that an employee was able to hack into the computer system and gain access to the financial payroll system, human resources and even email system. This employee used several methods in order to gain access into the system: IP spoofing, Data modification, Man in the middle attack and compromised-key attack. As a result the employee was able to tamper with payroll system. An auditor discovered the discrepancies and tried to make upper management aware of the situation through email, but the email was intercepted by the hacker. The hacker impersonated an employee and persuaded the auditor into granting him more access into the system which resulted in additional sabotage into the payroll system. Hacker

Ragan indicated that “The common thread in each case is the LinkedIn list, generic password policies, a lack of two-factor authentication, and remote access software from services such as GoToMyPC, LogMeIn, and TeamViewer.” When users recycle their passwords and use them across multiple web sites, it makes a hacker’s job easier as can be seen from this data breach. Another factor is the required use of specific logic to create a password. Most organizations require a password somewhere between 7 to 12 digits long. It must contain at least one uppercase letter and typically a number or special character. Passwords are set to expire within a set timeframe, and you aren’t allowed to reuse a previous password. Many times, users just change the last character of their previous password because it is difficult to continually try to remember unique passwords for

A root-cause analysis of the security breach revealed multi-factorial issues at the technical, individual, group, and organizational levels. At the technical level, the applications and web-tools

When I heard about the Ashley Madison scandal I thought that shutting down the site would have been a bad idea. I think there are a lot of sites out there that get threatened on a regular basis and it turns out to just be a hoax. It would be hard to shut down your website with the possibility of it also being a hoax. If Ashley Madison had a privacy agreement that the members signed when they joined the site then I think that Ashley Madison should have to compensate the members in some way. I’m assuming a lot of lawsuits came out of all of this so I figure that compensation in a lawsuit would be enough.

In December 2013, the CEO, Gregg Steinhafle, of Target announced that their company was affected by a data breach that occurred between November 27 and December 15, 2013. “Target disclosed that online thieves hacked into its computer system, stealing credit card or personal information from more than 100 million customers. Both personal data and credit card information may have been stolen from about 12 million people” (Abrams, 2014). The outcome of this breach has cost Gregg Steinhafle his job, as well as the trust of Target’s consumers, investors, and close to $150 million in breach-related costs. This breach is considered one of the largest retail data breaches in U.S. history due to the amount of personal data and credit card

Target a large retail corporation that operates over 1,700 stores across the United States. They also operate as an online retailer at target.com. In 2012 the retailer earned more than $73 billion dollars in revenue and grew their sales by 5.1% from the previous year. Looking at the revenue and sales growth rate it is hard to fathom that more money could not be spent to ensure that consumer data is protected as much as possible. As information security specialists one of the worst things that can happen is our network gets infiltrated and customer information is stolen. On December 19, 2013 Target released a statement stating that they have had an information

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.

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

Security experts say personal details of millions of users of the Ashley Madison website released by hackers appear to be genuine, as the fallout from the massive data dump begins to hit home.

-evaluate the impact of such a breach on the security of confidential information and on the infrastructure of the website.

Data breaches happen daily, in too many places at once to keep count. But there is some huge breach versus a small one and we will take some examples from the biggest or most significant breaches of the 21st century to show how much risk or damage the breach caused for companies, insurers and users or account holders.