Data Breach Summary

During the last Christmas season, Target announced that their data security was breached. According to David Lazarus in Los Angeles Times, Target stated that roughly 110 million customers’ information was illegally taken from their database. The information included their credit/debit card info, phone numbers, and email addresses. Target is one of the most popular grocery stores in the U.S.; they have a substantial amount of consumers. Because of this incident, consumers' trusts for the store have been decreasing. Worrying about losing its customers, the company offered a free year of credit monitoring and identity-theft protection, so the customers will feel more secure. Not only Target, some other large retailers also faced the same issues. They want their customers to trust that the companies can protect private data. However, should we not worry? Data breaches have been going on for about a decade, but we have not seriously thought about the issue. In order to protect people’s privacy, the federal government should make new laws concerning companies’ handling of customer information.

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.

This analysis discusses some issues and requirements to correct these issues that are outlined in the Turn Key University (TKU) data breach case study. In addition to these issues and requirements, some applicable laws will be discussed and some controls will be suggested for implementation.

Veteran Administration (VA) data breaches are one of the thing I worry about, for I am a veteran. Even though I have not been affected by any of the breaches as of yet, but it is still a possible that I can be affected. The VA has had a lot of breaches dating back to the year 2006, when a worker took a laptop home to continue his work, which was against regulation, but he keep doing it. After about 3 years of doing it, someone broke into his home and stole the laptop, with all the un-cryptic data for 26 million VA personnel.

The electronic protected health information (ePHI) gets electronically stored and collected in hard copy form as they secure the information. According to the U.S. Department of health and Human Service Office for Civil Rights (OCR) report, millions of people have been impacted by HIPAA data breaches. Hence, healthcare organizations must protect and secure personal health data now more than ever because of the threats that are associated with information. This would substantially increase the protection of healthcare from cyber threats. Moreover, these people are extremely diverse and the cleverness of their data information must be organized within hospitals. Medical records are in high demand because of the sophistication of the records.

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

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

A large amount of PII is stored in platforms utilized by universities and colleges, such as Banner Web. Bricker and Eckler (2016) stated, “Colleges and universities maintain large stores of sensitive data, including financial information and expensive research statistics, making them prime targets for hackers” (para. 2). Students, faculty, staff, and alumni are not aware of the security issues involved when using portable devices or identifying a phishing email. The most common data breaches in higher education are hacking and malware, spear phishing, and portable devices. Although social media is not a type of breach, hackers can plan a data breach by collecting personal

Cyber security breaches have shown a spike in 2015, with large-scale compromises on companies like Target, Sony and Home Depot. There is a strong demand to deploy more robust cyber security tools to prevent future attacks. FireEye, a cyber-security firm, has started to fill the void and is reaping the rewards.

Data breaches happen daily, in too many places at once to keep count. But there is some huge breach versus a small one and we will take some examples from the biggest or most significant breaches of the 21st century to show how much risk or damage the breach caused for companies, insurers and users or account holders.

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

Internet has grown leap and bounds over the last few years. This has resulted in a number of computer security breaches on the Internet. Most of the computers that use Internet are vulnerable to attack. Due to this reason, Intrusion Detection systems have grown rapidly and there is an ongoing research since it’s a developing field. ID (Intrusion Detection) is a type of a security management system that gathers and analyzes information to identify security breaches, which include both, attacks from outside the organization and attacks from inside as well (misuse). ID includes analysis of abnormal activity, tracking user policy violations, assessing systems and file integrity and vulnerability. It helps us differentiate the normal behavior of system and helps us obtain any abnormal activity that is taking place. This can be done easily using data mining and it helps increase its sustainability to attacks.

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: