Analysis : Patriot Financial Services Insider Threat Customer Data Breach

During the last Christmas season, Target announced that their data security was breached. According to David Lazarus in Los Angeles Times, Target stated that roughly 110 million customers’ information was illegally taken from their database. The information included their credit/debit card info, phone numbers, and email addresses. Target is one of the most popular grocery stores in the U.S.; they have a substantial amount of consumers. Because of this incident, consumers' trusts for the store have been decreasing. Worrying about losing its customers, the company offered a free year of credit monitoring and identity-theft protection, so the customers will feel more secure. Not only Target, some other large retailers also faced the same issues. They want their customers to trust that the companies can protect private data. However, should we not worry? Data breaches have been going on for about a decade, but we have not seriously thought about the issue. In order to protect people’s privacy, the federal government should make new laws concerning companies’ handling of customer information.

Once we determined that the data breach did not occur on our network we worked with the

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

Hackers can gain access to the computer records of banks, credit card companies, hospitals, merchants, universities, government agencies, and other organizations. Though such breaches occur much more rarely than phishing, even one instance can give the hacker access to millions of people’s personal data, including Social Security numbers, birth certificates, driver’s license numbers, health records, employment records, and financial information. The FBI reports that, since

This analysis discusses some issues and requirements to correct these issues that are outlined in the Turn Key University (TKU) data breach case study. In addition to these issues and requirements, some applicable laws will be discussed and some controls will be suggested for implementation.

Issue 4: Information Security officials failed to effectively trigger appropriate notifications and begin an investigation of the stolen data. The information security official’s incident report contained omissions and significant errors. This resulted in missed opportunity to re-create the contents of the laptop and external drive and to recognize the severity of the potential loss of data. The cybersecurity operations officials failed to ensure a timely investigation and notifications were made regarding the severity of the lost data (Opfer, 2006).

The government and major companies have frequently leaked and misused the public’s information. For example, in Ted Koppel’s 2005 article on “Take My Privacy, Please!”, he mentions how Bank of America lost personal information on about 1.2 million federal government employees, including some senators. LexisNexis unintentionally gave outsiders access to personal files on over 310,000 people. Time Warner

The purpose of this meeting is to inform you of a security breach that occurred in our company, and to inform you of what has been affected, how we found out, and what measures have been used to correct and prevent this from happening again. The following is a bulleted list of relevant information related to the security breach.

Due to the fact he was no longer employed under this department, Defendant was no longer privy to access sensitive SSD data, including passwords. Defendant continued to work for Intel as a private contractor and used a gate program to access an Intel computer from remote locations for e-mail purposes. Schwartz was warned to cease his use of gate programs twice; he argued after the first warning his alterations to the program made it secure but an administrator reminded him his usage of the program violated company policy. Shortly after, Defendant downloaded the password-cracking program “Crack” and ran it on several Intel computers before finding the log-in information for authorized user Ron B. Defendant used this information to log into the authorized user’s computer. Defendant copied the SSD password file from that computer onto another one, where he ran the Crack program to obtain the passwords of 35 more SSD users. Defendant believed if he could expose the flaws in the company’s security then he could regain his lost reputation. Upon returning from teaching classes in California, Defendant ran Crack on the SSD file once more on a superior personal computer. His activity was detected by another Intel administrator who—with other administrators—contacted the

Most of the parts of the assets affected include the computer's software and networks used by the company. This incident was detected in the month of February and as part of the Anthem, Inc. responsibility a formal warning was given right after detecting a possible breach to our software and network, but the hackers had already accessed some of our data.

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.

On an average of 2% a year, personal records are exposed from over 700 public breaches over all areas of the departmentalized sectors. Global cost per every lost or stolen record are on the average of over $100 containing secret and touchy information. There were 35% more security incidents detected within the last

All the consumers affected were also made vulnerable to subsequent identity theft given malicious attackers stole their personal data. Equifax was directly affected since its stock began to plunge immediately the news was made public. Additionally, the corporate governance of the company was tarnished given three Equifax executives sold shares worth around $2 million days after the breach discovery, and the “retiring” of the chief security information officers is questionable (Surane & Melin, 2017). Also, the company was exposed to litigations with some lobbyists and interest groups pushing regulators to hold Equifax accountable for the negligence and poor treatment of affected consumers. The proposed new data security laws will present a greater burden to other corporations. Two such laws are the Promoting Responsible Oversight of Transactions and Examinations of Credit Technology (PROTECT), and Freedom From Equifax Exploitation (FREE) will attract more government scrutiny and limit the type of personal data that companies can collect from customers (Alperan, Carter, & Sofio, 2017).

The potential of violations can come from numerous sources (Lawrence & Weber, 2011) (Consumer Information). Recently Equifax had a data breach of their customer’s personal information. The hackers accessed the names, social security numbers, birthdates, and addresses of 142 million American consumers (Consumer Information). This is frightening and happens more often that we think. According to PricewaterhouseCoopers executive, ”Cybercrime has emerged as a formidable threat. Over the years millions have fallen victim to theses attacks. In a survey of 583 U.S. companies, 90 percent said that hackers breached their company’s computers over the last twelve months (Lawrence & Weber, 2011). Cyber crimes occur when hackers attempt to damage or destroy a computer network or system of company’s data. Criminals will use one of the most harmful systems around. This system is called a zombie. A zombie is