Computer Security and Sony Data Breach 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.

Sony has multiple networks, but the PlayStation Network has over 77 million users. In April 2011, Sony characterized a security breach as an “illegal and unauthorized intrusion” of the Sony networks. In fact, there was a series of breaches by different groups of hackers. The information provided by registered users, including usernames, passwords, names, and addresses, was compromised. In addition, the credit card information of users who make online purchases may have been compromised. Sony did not announce this information until a week after the last breech. The network was shut down after the last of the breaches.

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.

The Target Corporation was exploited in December 2013 and then again in 2015. These breaches included customer’s personal identifying information and retailer’s data. This credit card data breach is a prime example of weak security and infrastructure. This breach happened over the course of one of the United States’ major holiday seasons, Christmas. The security issue involved hackers accessing Target’s customer 's credit and debit cards by the machines that were being used to swipe the cards. These hackers accessed Target’s network with a stolen username and password from a company that was providing refrigeration and HVAC services. This company could access Target’s network `remotely to monitor energy consumption and temperatures. With that, the hackers uploaded malware software on the Target’s credit card machines. The customer data hack happened across the nation, and it was performed in stores and not an online breach of Target customer information.

In December 2013, the CEO, Gregg Steinhafle, of Target announced that their company was affected by a data breach that occurred between November 27 and December 15, 2013. “Target disclosed that online thieves hacked into its computer system, stealing credit card or personal information from more than 100 million customers. Both personal data and credit card information may have been stolen from about 12 million people” (Abrams, 2014). The outcome of this breach has cost Gregg Steinhafle his job, as well as the trust of Target’s consumers, investors, and close to $150 million in breach-related costs. This breach is considered one of the largest retail data breaches in U.S. history due to the amount of personal data and credit card

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.

A data breach is an incident in which sensitive, protected or confidential data has potentially been viewed, stolen or used by an individual unauthorized to do so. Data breaches may involve personal health information (PHI), personally identifiable information (PII), trade secrets or intellectual property. The most common concept of a data breach is an attacker hacking into a corporate network to steal sensitive data. However, not all data breaches are so dramatic. If an unauthorized hospital employee views a patient's health information on a computer screen over the shoulder of an authorized employee that also constitutes a data breach.

Aside from the Playstation Outage, there had been larger and more nefarious data breaches in history that exploited weaknesses in internet, server, and network security. One such breach is when Heartland Payment Systems had, what was called, the most massive credit card security breach in history, with hackers embedding deep into Heartland security and recording card data. According to Bloomberg Business, it was estimated that “as many as 100 million cards issued by more than 650 financial services companies may have been compromised”. The attack cost Heartland $12.6 million, which was orchestrated by a man named Albert Gonzalez, who was also the cause for several other data breaches, each costing from thousands to millions of dollars. Another such attack was when Russian, and a Ukrainian, computer hackers assaulted NASDAQ stock exchange servers and stealing “more than 160 million credit and debit card numbers, target more than 800,000 bank accounts” (NY Daily News). Separate hacking operation spanned over seven years, attacking NASDAQ, but also affected “chains like 7-Eleven”. All the operations, in the period of time and the global scale it spanned, resulted “in at least $300 million in losses to companies and individuals”. One of the latest, and possibly the largest, data breaches of 2015, Anthem, the second largest health insurer in the US was hacked, compromising millions of account and personal data, as well as social security. When Anthem discovered that they had been

Jarvis, K., & Milletary, J. (2014, January 24). Inside a targeted point-of-sale data breach. Retrieved from http://krebsonsecurity.com/wp-content/uploads/2014/01/Inside-a-Targeted-Point-of-Sale-Data-Breach.pdf

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 December 2013, Target was attacked by a cyber-attack due to a data breach. Target is a widely known retailer that has millions of consumers flocking every day to the retailer to partake in the stores wonders. The Target Data Breach is now known as the largest data breach/attack surpassing the TJX data breach in 2007. “The second-biggest attack struck TJX Companies, the parent company of TJMaxx and Marshall’s, which said in 2007 that about 45 million credit cards and debit cards had been compromised.” (Timberg, Yang, & Tsukayama, 2013) The data breach occurred to Target was a strong swift kick to the guts to not only the retailer/corporation, but to employees and consumers. The December 2013 data breach, exposed Target in a way that many

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.

On average the cost of an IBM breach has risen to $4 million dollars per incident. In the previous year, a study showed that the average cost per breach was $3.79 million (Hackett, 2016). The cost of these breaches can vary widely by the industry type, but as IBM reported it cost millions of dollars to rectify these breaches. Its important for these companies to be aware of new technology and stay up to date on privacy software in order to cut these cost.

a significant amount of data security breaches are due to either employee oversight or poor business process. This presents a challenge for businesses as the solution to these problems will be far greater than simply deploying a secure content management system. Business processes will need to be examined, and probably re-engineered; personnel will need to be retrained, and a cultural change may be required within the organization. These alone are significant challenges for a business. A recent example of what is probably unintentional featured an Australian employment agency’s web site publishing “Confidential data including names, email addresses and passwords of clients” from its database on the public web site. An additional

A threat agent is the facilitator of an attack however; a threat is a constant danger to an asset.