Data Breach Research Paper

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

Statistics show that most security breaches are direct results of insider misconduct rather than being hacked. According to the most recent Verizon Data Breach Investigations Report, about “285 million records were compromised in 2008.” Seventy-four percent of the incidents were from inside sources. Users are more likely to be victims of computer virus infections, inquisitive students/co-workers, and hardware failures than to be victims of an Internet security attack.

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.

In the past 12 months, there have been nearly 432 million accounts hacked belonging to many websites and applications. Many of this information stolen was sensitive, personal data such as credit card information, phone numbers, passwords, and even addresses.

In the Data breach Investigation report of 2012, the compromised records 174 million security incidents from all over the world were analyzed also the investigation confirmed 855 data breaches. The attacks were carried out from 19 different nations and affected all kinds of organizations small and large.

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.

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.

After the Ashley Madison website got hacked, Ashley Madison released two statements on Facebook on July 20 and another on August 18. In the Facebook posts they explained how they had stringent security measures and are working with leading IT vendors from around the world. They hired other security in order to secure the sites and close unauthorized points. The Ashley Madison team said that they are using the Digital Millennium Copyright Act and it has removed all posts related to this incident and all personally identifiable information. They also referred to their paid delete option by stating, “the “paid-delete” option offered by AshleyMadison.com does in fact remove all information related to a member’s profile and communications activity. The process involves a hard-delete of a requesting user’s profile, including the removal of posted pictures and all messages sent to

When some of the members found out that the information could possibly be leaked, they threatened to sue the company. People were being scammed and blackmailed. The Ashley Madison Company, still hasn’t found the hackers but they don’t believe it was an employee. Michael DeCesare said

Ashley Madison website (www.ashleymadison.com) was hacked on July 15, 2015 purportedly by a group called The Impact Team. This website was a commercial one for married people seeking extra marital affairs. Over 60 gigabyte of data was stolen and compromised from this attack. The compromised data includes critical business data of the parent company Avid Life Media as well as that of the also sister companies (Established Men) and customers’ personal data such as phone numbers, billing address, partial credit card information, names, email accounts, passwords and sexual orientations. This breach affected over 37 million customers spanned around 46 countries. The management of Avid Life media was informed about the hack of their IT infrastructure

On July 12, 2015, Ashley Madison employers logged onto their site, just as they do on a normal day, but to find a message stating that the site is being hacked. The hacker team wrote in a statement, “Avid Life Media has been instructed to take Ashley Madison and Established Men offline permanently in all forms, or we will release all customer records, including profiles with all the customer’s secret sexual fantasies and matching credit card transactions, real names and addresses, and employee documents and emails,” (Zetter, 2015). Zetter also informs us that the company defiantly ignored the message and continued to keep both sites up, promising its customers that they have increased the security of its

My article is about a hack to a dating site called Ashley Madison. The Ashley Madison website is a site where married couples go to cheat on their spouse. The Ashley Madison website was at first warned by the hackers called the “Impact team”. the website being so full of money and having their motto “ Life is short. Have an affair.” did not tear the website down. later the impact team hacked and dumped 300 gb of users personal information that could be seen on the dark web and on the internet. this hack is important to the U.S. because 33 million of people’s accounts and personal information are leaked. and most of the people are going to be divorced and lose their jobs because they work for a military that does not allow adultery.

There have been a series of high profile data breaches in the last few years, including Home Depot, Target, and T Mobile (Bennett 2015). A hack of Rochester- based insurance provider Excellus BlueCross BlueShield compromised the records of over ten million customers, including medical and credit card data. Although the hack happened at least two years prior, customers were not notified until September of 2015 (Orr 2015). In an effort to prevent data breaches, the FTC will require transparency from companies that collect user information under DATA.

Data breaches are increasingly common as companies are faced with securing a multitude of networks, devices, applications, users, and files used in the course of conducting business. And with global workforces and the rise of cloud computing, security perimeters are more difficult to define than ever before. These issues combine to create a perfect storm – a climate ripe for hackers to take advantage of. (Lord, 2017) Below are the trending data loss trends to watch out for: