Cyber Attack on RSA Security LLC

A root-cause analysis of the security breach revealed multi-factorial issues at the technical, individual, group, and organizational levels. At the technical level, the applications and web-tools

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.

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."

A root-cause analysis of the security breach revealed multi-factorial issues at the technical, individual, group, and organizational levels. At the technical level, the applications and web-tools were initially tested and evaluated in an ideal environments that was not equivalent to the clinical practice

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.

Three different areas of vulnerabilities was identify as the result of this data breach. The hackers where able to take advantage of these vulnerabilities and use them gain the customers of TJX Companies, Inc. retail stores valuable and trusted private information that was in trust to them.

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.

On May 5, 2014 Premera Blue Cross, the third-largest health insurer in Washington state, announced today that the company was the target of a sophisticated cyber attack. This attack affected as many as 11 million patients across this great country. As a result of the malicious attack, attackers may have gained unauthorized access to names, dates of birth, Social Security numbers, mailing addresses, email addresses, phone numbers, member identification numbers, bank account information and claims and clinical information. This information may have went back as far as 2002. Not only did this attack affect many unfortunate Americans, but also the Premera Blue Cross CEO Jeff Roe.

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.

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

Over 40 millon people have been victums of the breach. Information of these people may have inclueded names, mailing adresses, phone numbers or email adresses, along with other information. There were multiple instances of fraud , where customers relaized some of their cards might have been sold on the black market.

The analysis of 2,260 breaches and more than 100,000 incidents at 67 organizations in 82 countries shows that organizations are still failing to address basic issues and well-known attack methods. The (DBIR, 2016) shows, for example, that nearly two-thirds of confirmed data breaches involved using weak, default or stolen passwords. Also shows that most attacks exploit known vulnerabilities that organizations have never patched, despite patches being available for months – or even years – with the top 10 known vulnerabilities accounting for 85% of successful exploit “Organizations should be investing in training to help employees know what they should and shouldn’t be doing, and

What would later turn out to be one of the deadliest hacks in the history of cyber crime began when actor Seth Rogen and screenwriter Goldberg Evans joked about producing a comedy that would feature the assassination of North Korean’s leader Kim Jong-un. A few months later, the reality of the joke dawned when Sony Pictures Entertainment made an announcement that both Rogen and Goldberg would direct the movie dubbed “The Interview.” The movie was to be officially released toward the end of 2014. However, just before the release of the movie a tragic incident unfolded that left hackers in total control of Sony Pictures Entertainment Network. A group by the name The Guardians of Peace (GOP) had breached Sony Pictures Entertainment and brought their operations to a standstill. The hackers stole over a hundred terabytes of private date containing salaries, Social Security Numbers, movies, and others personal identifiable data. A few days later, the stolen data started popping up on the internet along with GOP’s demands including a warning not to release the movie “The Interview” (Sanchez, 2015). In this paper, an analysis of the motivation behind the attack and response to safeguard against further breeching will be dealt with.

Stephen Doherty, a researcher and blogger for the Symantec Corporation, provides a case study that proves targeted attacks are growing and evolving. His case study entitled, “The Mask,” is a cyber-espionage group established in 2007 to hack, monitor and exfiltrate data from infected targets. Their method of breach uses intense spear phishing to lure the victims in using deceiving emails. In addition, The Mask coincidently enough specializes in tools that target Spanish speakers.

Before we hit the nail on the head, we will quickly introduce you to a life changing opportunity, which of course, will change your story for good. We assume that you already know us as one of the leading information security companies that helps businesses and individuals to secure their data and prevent unauthorized people from accessing it. Not only that we help companies and individual provide strong security for their data, but educate corporate and individuals on different security courses. This article is an excerpt from one of our numerous security course, specifically designed for our students. You too can also become one of them by visiting the training pages available on the site. We have been in the industry for a while and everyone knows our team. However, if you are just hearing about Hack2Secure, we strongly welcome you to the security experts’ team.