Anthem, Inc.: Case Study

What: 43 million records which include usernames, hashed passwords, email addresses and also ad-related data of users were hacked

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

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.

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."

Anthem policy is driven by their focus on creating the best health care value in the industry, ex-celling at day to day operations and executions and capitalization on new opportunities to drive growth. With a reputation for innovation, Anthem Inc affiliates are committed to establishing a relationship with customers, physicians, hospitals and other health care clinicians as trusted partners. This company labeled as one of the largest health care insurance providers ("Products and Services”,n.d). They deliver many leading health benefit solutions through a broad portfolio of integrated health care plans and related services, along with a broad range of specialty products like life and disability insurance benefits, dental, vision, behavioral health and long-term care

This case study, written in 2009 is not the only case where a major data breach has occurred within organizations. In the late 2011 Sony’s PlayStation Network (PSN) was breached impacting up to 77 million user’s accounts including data on names, address and possibly credit card details. In late 2013 Target had a cyber-attack that compromised a large quantity of its data and had 110 million accounts compromised. Finally in September 2014 Apple had their iCloud server breached by hacking that compromised all the users of the online server. These occurrences still have some unanswered questions and several experts have yet to decipher the actual reason as to why the security breach occurred.

However, soon after the breach had been made public there were several reports that came out saying that China was the one to blame. Again, it’s important to note that these reports have never been fully confirmed. After investigation, Anthem said they found that five of their IT worker’s credentials had been compromised through a phishing attack. Rebecca Herold, CEO of The Privacy Professor and co-founder of the consulting firm SIMBUS Security and Privacy Services stated: "The fact that access was obtained using the credentials of at least five employees points to the very longstanding weak link with information security - ensuring personnel know and understand how to secure the information they have access to and how to recognize phishing attempts."

Anthem Inc and Cigna Corp are suing each other for breaching their merger agreement. Anthem and Cigna originally had a deal made in 2015 that would consolidate the top of the industry in to a few big corporations, but there were behind the scenes conflict between the two partners. The Justice Department filed an antitrust suit to block the deal. Federal judge decided against the merger and Anthem appealed the verdict to the Supreme Court. Anthem decided to terminate the merger agreement stating that Cigna former partner sabotaged the deal and stated that is would seek to claim massive damages against Cigna.

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 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.

Recently, the company has been the subject of a data breach in which confidential files in the network have been accessed by an unknown party. Upon investigation we have found that a supervisor that handles customer complaints received an e-mail from what appeared to have been a customer with a complaint regarding an error on the website. Upon investigation he found no such error, but did find that the return address did not exist. It is very likely the company has become the victim of one or more social engineers seeking to exfiltrate data from the company. It is believed that that source of the attack was a spear phishing campaign via the e-mail sent to the supervisor that oversees customer complaints. While supervisor e-mails are not normally

THERE WAS A CYBER ATTACK ON A A MEDICAL INSURANCE COMPANY. THE COMPANY WAS CALLED PRIMIER BLUE CROSS. THRU THE CYBER attack over 11 million customers were affected by the cyber attack. unfortunately this attacks were not discovered till January 29 and the process had started may 5th of that year.

Bank of America is a multinational banking institute and one of the most trusted in the banking industry. This organizations sole purpose is to protect the customer’s confidentiality and assets by ensuring that data protection is the number one priority; however any organization when holding personal information can be a victim of data breach and BoA is not exempt. One of the largest risks BoA faces today is Mobile Banking. This consumer convenience is used by fifty percent of smart phone owners (Finney, 2014). Phishing is also threat to the banking industry; this strategy by hackers allows the extraction of consumer passwords and other sensitive information. Hackers targeting banking institution employees with convincing e-mails that fool them into clicking on malicious links-which ultimately compromise their credentials or

It is important to note that whether an attack is perpetrated by a hacker group, other corporations or individuals, organizations must always prepare adequately through intrusion detection and prevention systems in place. Data breaches can have very devastating business and social impact to large businesses and their customers – the users. For instance, were Cloudflare attacked by a competing company, their trade secrets could have given the opponents ammunition to take them out of the field. In addition, lost data could influence criminal activity if for instance particular client information, for

With the beginning of internet, various online attacks have been increased and among them, the most popular attack is phishing. Phishing is an online security attack where the hacker targets in achieving sensitive information like passwords, credit card information etc. from the users by making them to believe what they see is what it is. It is the combination of social engineering and technical methods to convince the user to reveal their personal data. The paper discusses about the Phishing social engineering attack theoretically and their issues in the life of human Beings. At the same time this paper also provides different techniques to detect these attacks so that they can be easily dealt with in case one of them occurs. The paper gives a thorough survey of various Phishing attacks along with their preventive measures.