Anthem Breach Analysis

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.

The dystopian novella, Anthem, is set in an age in which every aspect of life is controlled by oppressive leaders. In this society, everyone was deemed equal to each other, meaning no new ideas were allowed and the past could not be discussed. Individuals are told they exist only for the sake of serving society and have no other purpose. Strict rules were put in place involving everyone’s daily lives, their partners, and even when they were allowed to smile. The goal of this controlling environment is to be completely free from conflict and maintain peace and order by giving citizens little freedom.

The story of Anthem takes place in some unspecified future in which freedom and individual rights have been obliterated. Equality 7-2521, the protagonist, is a street sweeper who finds a tunnel where he conducts his science experiments. Throughout the book we see him change and move towards individualism as he discovers how capable he really is. Ayn Rand uses vast amounts of literary devices to describe the evolution of Equality 7-2521. In the dystopian novella, Anthem, Ayn Rand expresses epochal symbolism and poetic personification in order to passionately display the individual’s superiority over the collective.

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

A society where a man’s precedence is to serve only for his brothers. Laws and rules are crafted to prevent promotion of individualism and preserve cruel uniformity under the form of moral virtue. Anthem is a clear depiction of a repressive society in which the word “I” is unheard of, and men belong to the collective word “We”. The norms in the society force agreement and sacrifice among all the people in the society. The idea that,“If you are not needed by your brother men, there is no reason for you to burden the earth with your bodies”(Rand 8), has been pushed into the average mindset of the society. The people’s lives are fully controlled by a group that maintains a powerful dictatorship by conquering the public from the beginning of their lives called the “Council of Vocations”. This explicates the objectionable consequences of collectivism that the society has suffered. One of the most obvious features of Anthem is it’s use of language, especially the nonexistence of the word "I”. The use of the language is confusing, but it must be understood if the book's meaning is to be clear. Characters refer to themselves using the first person plural "we" and not the first person singular "I". The use of the plural rather than the singular self-reference, goes to the core of Anthem’s meaning. It is found that Equality 7-2521 is on the path to

In August 2000, Kaiser Permanente Online experienced a serious security breach, due to a flawed script written in the pharmacy refill application. The security breach concatenated several hundred individual e-mails containing personal patient data. As a result of the breach, 19 members received Private Health Information (PHI) about other members. Kaiser Permanente was made aware of the breach when two members notified the organization that they had received the concatenated e-mail messages.

In August 2000, Kaiser Permanente Online experienced a serious breach in security. The security breach concatenated several hundred individual e-mails containing personal patient data. As a result of the security breach, 19 members receiving private data about other members. Kaiser Permanente was made aware of the breach when two members notified the organization that they had received the concatenated e-mail messages.

Anthem’s previous strategy, which focused on cost leadership, was supported by numerous factors including their high brand recognition through the Blue Cross Blue Shield network. However, because of the post ACA environment and novel payment models, the company is shifting towards a differentiation strategy. Their new strategy focuses on the following objectives: (Anthem website)

The ethical issue Anthem faced is that employees felt they were betrayed and that Anthem violated their relationship which was built upon promises. This happened as result of a company decision and its communication thereafter.

Security breaches of EMRs vary from someone without consent viewing the patient’s information, to a hacker using the information to steal one’s identity. According to Privacy Rights Clearing House, more than 260 million data breaches have occurred in the United States, including those of health related records. Approximately 12 percent of data breaches involve medical organizations (Gellman, 2012). According to Redspin, a provider of Health Insurance Portability and Accountability Act risk analysis and IT security assessment services, more than 6 million individual’s health records were compromised during a period from August 2009 and December 2010 (Author Unknown, 2010). A provision of the Health Information Technology for Economic and Clinical Health (HITECH) Act requires all breaches affecting 500 or more people to be reported to the Department of Health and Human Services. This reporting is to be accomplished within 60 days of discovery. The Redspin report covering the period above involved 225 breaches of protected health information. The amount of people with access to an individual’s health record creates concern with confidentiality. According to the Los Angeles

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 the Experian breach, on October 1, 2015, 15 million records were reached. These records included information such as social security numbers and ID numbers. The attack reached T-Mobile customers, as well as those who had never even had service. Experian serves as T-Mobile’s application processor, for people who had signed up for T-Mobile between the dates of September 1, 2013 and September 16, 2013. Even those who canceled service or never signed up, the information was available

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).

A good example of this is the attack that recently hit Metropolitan Urology Group in Milwaukee, Urology Austin and ABCD Children's Pediatrics in San Antonio. This attack led to the need for the three providers to notify 352,744 patients that their personal data might have been exposed. In addition, the providers are now paying for identity theft resolution services and/or credit monitoring for 12 months.

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