Balancing Cost And Risk Of The Soc

A data breach incident which happened in 2014 could cost Sony Corp. $8 million in settlements, Bloomberg reported. The data breach happened when North Korean hackers were angered by "The Interview", a film that was centered around a fictional plot to eliminate Kim Jong-Un. Sony is reportedly going to pay $4.5 million to former and existing employees, while the lawyers who handled the case are expected to get $3.5 million.

Cyber threats have increased dramatically over the past few years, with large companies such as Amazon, Netflex, PayPal, Wikipedia and most recently Equifax, experiencing high profile breaches. Traditional tools, defenses and responses have been strained with keeping up with the level and sophistication of an very organized and ubiquitous hacking community, which has coalesced into organized crime syndicates that the FBI and law enforcement continues to battle.

A recent increase in large scale data breaches has exposed a multitude of cybersecurity vulnerabilities that pose a definite risk to consumers (Lorio, 2017). In some cases, a data breach can distress an establishment so much that other organizations experience a backlash from the repercussions (Kosseff, 2011). The Equifax data breach of 2017 is a perfect example of this kind of event as it caused an overwhelming economic repercussion that affected other major corporations and more than 143 million credit card customers worldwide (Janakiraman, Lin, & Rishika, 2018).

Target to the Office of Personnel Management—the private sector and government equally feel the after-effects of data breaches. Data breaches can result in lawsuits from the affected victims. Lawsuits continue to harm a company’s finances and reputation long after the data breach occurs.

In December 2013 we have noticed the target Data breach which resulted in affecting the 40 million credit and debit cards, which was thought one of the biggest data breach .Because of this breach 70 million accounts have been compromised leaking the security information of the people like phone numbers and address . But this year we have noticed the Home Depot breach which is much greater than the target breach ,which compromised 56 million cards.

According to Information Week, within eight months, the company had spent more than $20 million investigating the incident, notifying customers and hiring lawyers to deal with the dozens of associated lawsuits. The hack alerted the industry to the threat of cybercriminals and pushed lawmakers to fast-track data security legislation, Information Week reported (Heussner, 2010).

Right now, 37% of Internet users in the US are surfing the web with outdated versions of Java (CSIS, 2015). For organizations that have not paid close attention to cybersecurity in the past, now is your wakeup call. According to a recently released study, the average cost of a data breach in the United States has climbed from $5.9 million to a staggering $6.5 million per breach (Ponemon, 2015). This is enough to not only hurt many organizations, but also cause irrevocable damage to their economic standings. The purpose of this paper is to examine what the root cause for most of these breaches are. From a review of the largest breaches in the past 5 years, I have come down to this conclusion: Unpatched software is single handedly costing American organizations billions of dollars every year in expensive and embarrassing security breaches.

When researching major security breaches that companies have endured, the company that really interested me was Home Depot. The company had a sever security breach in 2014, in which over 40 million credit card numbers and 50 million emails were compromised over a five-month period. As mentioned, the breach occurred in 2014 over a course of five-months. During the duration of those five months, an intruder obtained a vendor’s credentials and gained access to the company’s network. The security hack affected individuals who lived in the United States and Canada who had used the personal self-checkout machines at the stores. The impact the breach had on the company was frightful. The amount of repercussions the breach had on the company lasted for a long time. As a result of the breach, many lawsuits arose from whole situation. After the end of the trials, Home Depot paid 8.7 million in legal fees and had a 161 million pre tax expenses that covered the incident.

Computer security breaches have been occurred in too many places since information technology is used. Security practitioners declare that those breaches incident cost vast businesses that is estimated more than $1 billion, according to Pinsent Masons, (2014). There are also non-financial costs that companies may suffer. Figure 1 is illustrated World's Biggest Data Breaches that happened last decade.

Many lessons can be learned from these breaches. First of all, the foundations of security need to be in place and reviewed very often to keep relevant in today's ever changing electronic world. Secondly, the people in charge need to understand the importance of their position and should be held accountable for any personal liabilities they may cause for the company through improper or inadequate performance or reporting. Another lesson is that the cost of prevention is worth so much more than the costs of dealing with the consequences. Each one of these examples have resulted in huge

People across the world are becoming disproportionately dependent on modern day technology, which results in more vulnerability to cyber-attacks including cybersecurity breaches. Today, the world continues to experience inordinate cases of cybersecurity meltdowns. There is a rapid growth in complexity and volume of cyber-attacks, and this undermines the success of security measures put in place to make the cyberspace secure for users. Cyber-attacks on both private and public information systems are a major issue for information security as well as the legal system. While most states require government organizations and certain federal vendors to report incidences of data breaches, no equivalent legislation exists to cover private entities.

Why so much money? If someone with bad intentions has confidential information like bank account access, they could use blackmail/scare tactics to receive more information, or go ahead and steal all the money anyway! Is this not scary? Another consequence is that since hackers are so successful, people are being added to their ranks, creating 50,000+ spam websites to steal information and send out 420,000 spam emails every hour in Britain(Brenner 31). There is so much cybercrime that unless you are a major player, no one can find you, nor will they have the time or manpower(Brenner 33).

A recent survey of security breaches at Fortune 500 companies showed that breaches in information security could result in annual financial losses of up to $24 billion. With that said, 90% of large corporations have found one or more breaches in their computer security and even worse, 70% of those detected breaches were considered severe, many resulting in proprietary information theft and financial fraud. Hackers can use several different paths through any application to harm the business. If the companies secure host and network-level entry points, focus of attacks usually shifts to the public interfaces.

In the last decade it’s amazing how technology has advanced over the years and will continue to advance for many years to come. Every year there is a new cell phone from Apple or Samsung, with new features that make our lives more convenient. From faster software to higher picture quality and so on. I am unable to recall the last time I used a camera to take pictures or went to the bank to deposit a check. Technology advances every day and many can’t wait to see what’s next to come. But with new technology comes greater risk for violations of privacy. In the following research paper I will discuss the types of security breaches and the cost associated with these breaches that businesses around the world face on a daily basis.

As the world moves forward, there are new threats that arise and it is difficult to handle each one. One of the largest threats to any country are cyber-attacks/computer hacking. Each day on the news there is a developing story about a country’s data base being hacked by an anonymous source and all the classified files were exposed to the public. As a result, cybersecurity has increased significantly in the countries that can afford it. The United States and China have recently increased spending and research on cybersecurity to protect their classified documents. Unfortunately, as technology evolves, there are new ways for both countries to get hacked once again. Cybersecurity is the future for national security and must be updated each