Computer Hacking Is The Scale Of The Problem Essay

A direct cyberattack in 2014 to JPMorgan Chase caused a compromised of accounts effecting a total of 76 million households and seven million small businesses. We are clearly, in times when consumer confidence in the digital operations of corporate America is on shaky ground. In directly, banking is taking the brunt of the fallout but major stores also have breaches which of course are directly related to their financial data. Store like, Target, Home Depot and a number of other retailers have experienced major data breaches. 40 million cardholders and 70 million others were compromised at Target alone in 2013 and an attack at Home Depot in September, 2013 affected 56 million cardholders.

The purpose of this paper is to touch on the issue of Hacking. It will go into detail about the history, evolution, future and prevention of Hacking. In addition, this paper will discuss different types of hackers and their motivation behind hacking. This paper examines the major impact caused by malicious hackers and give modern examples of such attacks. To conclude, it will predict how hacking will be in the near future and give the precautionary measures Information Security professionals can take to mitigate the risk of being victimized.

This paper explores seven references that report the results from research conducted on-line regarding the 2013 Target breach. According to the website “Timeline of Target 's Data Breach And Aftermath: How Cybertheft Snowballed For The Giant Retailer” (2015), the breach occurred November and December 2013 in which customers who shopped at Target locations credit and debit cards were breached and their personal information was exposed. Upon their investigation, it was determined their point of sale system was hacked. “Wikipedia” states point of sale system which is used by third party vendors has cash registers as well as barcodes which stores customer’s information. The website “What is Packet Sniffer” (2016), Packet Sniffing may have been a way the attacked happened. “RAM Scraping Attack” website indicates what RAM means and how this type of attack happens. “What is a Firewall in Networking and How They Protect Your Computers” (2014), “What is Endpoint Security? Data Protection 101” and “Why SSL? The Purpose of using SSL Certificates” websites each provide ways to reduce and/or prevent future attacks.

This paper explores seven references that report the results from research conducted on-line regarding the 2013 Target breach. According to the website “Timeline of Target 's Data Breach And Aftermath: How Cybertheft Snowballed For The Giant Retailer” (2015), the breach occurred November and December 2013 in which customers who shopped at Target locations credit and debit cards were breached and their personal information was exposed. Upon their investigation, it was determined their point of sale system was hacked. “Wikipedia” states point of sale system which is used by third party vendors has cash registers as well as barcodes which stores customer’s information. The website “What is Packet Sniffer” (2016), Packet Sniffing may have been a way the attacked happened. “RAM Scraping Attack” website indicates what RAM means and how this type of attack happens. “What is a Firewall in Networking and How They Protect Your Computers” (2014), “What is Endpoint Security? Data Protection 101” and “Why SSL? The Purpose of using SSL Certificates” websites each provide ways to reduce and/or prevent future attacks.

In January 2007, TJX Companies Inc. released a statement to the press that an estimated 40 million of their customer’s credit card accounts had been compromised (although final reports state that over 94 million accounts were affected) (Berg 2008). Through the company’s POS (Point of Sales) system, credit card information was stolen by a ring of hackers and approximately $4.5 billion spent on these cards (Berg 2008). What the hackers did was intercepted the credit card information from customers who swiped their cards at the store and then created their own physical cards using this information. Then they sold the credit cards to people, who turned around and used these cards at retail stores, like Walmart (Agrawal 2011). Three areas of weakness within the company’s IT systems that allowed for an attack of this scale were: inadequate wireless security, improper storage of customer data and failure to encrypt customer account data (Berg 2008).

Michael’s Store, Inc. is an arts & crafts Retail chain. It has more than 1040 stores located in 49 US states & Canada. The company also owns and operates the Aaron brother’s retail chain, which happens to have an additional 115 stores across the Country. Michael’s store Inc. had a Security breach, which took place between May 8, 2013 and January 27, 2014. About 2.6 million cards or about 7 percent of payment cards used at its stores during the period were affected. Alarmingly, its subsidiary Aaron brothers also had been breached between June 26, 2013 and February 27, 2014. It was reported that Aaron brothers had 400,000 cards impacted. The duration of the treacherous attack in total was 8 months (Schwartz, 2014). In this report, security breach of Michael’s store Inc. is analyzed. The topics covered are how the breach occurred, what did the authorities do to educate the customers & how in future such attacks can be avoided.

(April 2015) today our financial and personal information is everywhere. It is in our phones for mobile payments, in our wallets on our credit cards and in the data centers and clouds of the companies and third parties that complete transactions on our behalf. With so much personal information—quite literally—floating around various access points, it has never been more lucrative or easy for cyber-criminals to access and mine private information to sell on the black market.The Target data breach at the end of 2013, which affected the card payment information of more than 40 million shoppers and the personal data of almost 70 million consumers, kick-started a continuous barrage of point-of-sale (POS) attacks affecting consumers, businesses and banks throughout 2014. Between the breaches at Dairy Queen, Home Depot and Neiman Marcus, it seemed like cyber-criminals were always one step ahead of the game, using malware and card-skimming techniques to gain access to confidential

In December 2013, Target announced that massive amounts of credit and debit card information they collected over the years might be in the danger of theft. The credit card breach could affect as many as 70 million customers who swept cards in the retail stores or linked their cards with the membership card, the RedCard. Each card information contains a card number, holder’s name, address, phone number and etc. The more information the thieves got, the more conveniently the thieves could use them to get benefits from the card holders. Jia Lynn Yang and Amrita Jayakumar, the authors of “Target says up to 70 million more customers were hit by December data breach”, write about how bad people will use customers’ information to crime. These thieves possibly shop online by inserting the card information. They could also contact with the victims to gather more sensitive information, and even hack into their computers. This event forces us to seriously consider the crisis in how retails protect customers’ data (Yang &

Hacking In the Business Society From history we can observer that "human society" is easily influenced, and often mislead. There is a near endless amount of examples for this, ranging from the Suicidal Sect leaders (David Koresh http://www.rickross.com/reference/waco/waco321.html ), to mad dictators, with aspirations of taking over the world. This human susceptibility of being easily mislead, is clearly apparent when dealing with the issue of "Hacking", and "Hacking In the Business Society". The movie industry has played a great role in misinforming society of who a hacker is, and what they can do.

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

For some individuals, hacking can be a hobby they like to undertake in order to analyze how many computers or the systems they can gain access to. While hacking seems harmless, there are those who do this vice maliciously so that they can get access to customer/ client information, the details of credit cards, their passwords, email addresses and identity fraud (Riem, 2001). Having this unauthorized access to these information warrants an arrest, and should the criminals be found, they are liable for their crimes.

As the world becomes more and more reliant on computers the computer hacking industry is greatly rising. With people such as Kevin Mitnick, who is known as a "computer terrorist" (Kjochaiche 1), computerized information isn't safe any more. Kevin is known as "the most high-profiled computer criminal and responsible for more havoc in the computer world today."(1) He considered this a fun and easy task. He got caught and thrown into prison, but once he got out nothing changed. Kevin stated that as long as the technology is there it just calls to people to break into it. Computer hackers usually start off young, thinking that it is nothing but a little harmless fun. But as they get older, they realize it has turned into

The fight against hackers and cyber crime is a global problem and nationally and internationally, the threats they caused have been recognized and acknowledged.

Cybercrime has become a fast growing concern for the 21st century as businesses, institutions and individuals grow into an interconnected web of computer networks. Online business transactions, along with the sharing of personal information, are vulnerable to a host of disasters that can reap economic and social havoc. Some sources say that today, cybercrime costs more than $1.0 trillion to society--Global Industry Analysts, Inc. forecasted the world cyber security market to reach $80 billion by 2017 (Gale, 2011).

Their operations are very slick and swift such that stolen data is quickly exploited within seconds of being submitted by unsuspecting victims. Since 2005, over 400,000 databases have been compromised since 2005, and thousands more have gone unnoticed or reported. About 40 percent of those involved in IT security have no fixed figure on the number of hackings their companies have experienced. One of the rapidly increasing areas of ecommerce is in the use of web-based applications to replace traditional over-the counter transactions. Hackers have expectedly, latched on. According to a study by Gartner, over 75 percent of Internet security breaches are due to flaws and loop holes in software. The reason for this is that, applications are normally designed and put together quickly to get the system running, and no time is spend analyzing and assessing security implications. As computer hackers continue to step up their operations in line with technology advancements, the securities and future industry recorded a 150 percent increase in the number of suspicious activities detected by their systems. During the same time, research carried out at the University of Maryland indicated that a computer connected to the Internet was subject to an attempted hack every 40 seconds. The battle between ecommerce websites and consumers wages on, according to an independent analyst, ‘consumers are losing a tug of war.’ Simon Smelt, an economist who runs a survey company