Experian Breach Case Study

The bank record theft was exposed April 28, 2005 when police in Hackensack, New Jersey charged nine people, including seven bank workers, in an alleged plot to steal financial records of thousands of bank customers. Bank of America and Wachovia Bank were the two biggest banks that were affected by this large banking breach in 2005. 670,000 customer account information was stolen by bank employees. In addition to confidential banking information, the thieves also obtained employment information for these same accounts. Customer account numbers and balances were allegedly sold to a middleman, then the information was sold to collection agencies. On a smaller scale, other banks were also affected by the theft such as, Commerce Bancorp and PNC Financial Services Group. Bank of America is constantly, having to communicate with their customers to reassure them that those that customer their accounts are not experiencing fraud or identity theft. Both Bank of America and Wachovia customers whose account information was stolen during this breach were to receive complimentary one-year credit monitoring service along with having each account directly monitored by the

At an early age, Barry Minkow was introduced to the carpet cleaning industry by his mother who worked part time as a telephone solicitor for a small carpet cleaning company. This insight of the industry allowed Minkow to understand that the carpet cleaning industry was one which had very few barriers to entry, no licensing requirements, and required only a small amount of capital to enter. Also, because of these few barriers to entry, the industry has historically attracted a larger number of faulty startups in comparison to other industries. At 16 years old, Minkow started his carpet cleaning company under the name of ZZZZ Best Company. Right away he had a difficult time with customer

During the dates of November 27 through December 2013, the department store Target experienced a data breach in which approximately 40 million customers credit and debit cards were exposed. During this breach, customer’s personal information may have also been exposed for use of possible fraud. January

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.

After a year of battle in court Sherri Shepherd and her estranged husband Lamar Sally have settled their divorce and have come to terms with a child support agreement.

Home depot was the target of a cyberattack on their information system infrastructure that lasted from April of 2014 to September of 2014. As a result of the attack and following data breach, 56 million credit-card accounts and 53 million email addresses were stolen. (“Home Depot Hackers Exposed 53 Million Email Addresses”) The cyberattack involved several steps. First, the attackers gained third party credentials allowing them into the system. Next they exploited an unknown weakness in the system that allowed for the attackers to elevate their own access privileges. Finally, they installed malware on Home Depot’s self-checkout systems in the U.S. and Canada, allowing

Anthem is a medical insurance provider that currently serves over 74 million people. On December 10, 2014, Anthem was victim to a data breach that resulted in over 37 million personal records being hacked from their servers. Fortunately, the attack was contained to only one day, but it was still enough to become one of the largest data breaches in corporate history. Shockingly, the hack wasn’t actually discovered until January 27, 2015. What lead to the discovery was when a data administrator discovered a query that was started using his own credentials (Ragan). Just over a week later - on February 4th - Anthem announced that there had been a massive data breach to the public. The breach was so severe, that even Anthem’s own CEO, Joseph Swedish, said that his personal information along with several other Anthem associates were taken during the breach.

From November 27 to December 15, 2013 Target Corporation released 70 million customers’ personal information. On average, it takes companies 200 days to uncover they are being hacked (Lunden, 2015). It only took Target 12 days to figure out the crisis that began happening. On December 19, Target originally said only 40 million credit and debit card accounts may have been compromised during Black Friday weekend to December 15. “The information stolen included customer names, credit or debit card number, and the card’s expiration date and CVV” (McGrath, 2014). Although Target never clarified how they were hacked, security experts say that hackers targeted their POS system. “Target spent $61 million through Feb. 1 responding to the breach, according

On September 8, 2015, it was discovered that a Patriot Financial Services (PFS) employee, whom provided customer support services to clients, had stolen personal financial data from approximately 50K of their customers. The data stolen by this employee was comprised of personal customer information including full names, home addresses, social security numbers, contact numbers, bank account numbers, driver 's license numbers, birth dates, email addresses, mother 's maiden names, pin’s and account balances. The suspect employee then proceeded to leak out this

Pat Regnier and Suzanne Woolley in their article, “Thank You for Calling Equifax. Your Business Is Not Important to Us” discuss the issue of the Equifax data breach that happened earlier this summer. Regnier and Woolley provide details that the data breach may have released the information of 143 million people in the U.S. and that Equifax knew about the possibility of this data breach since March when it was made known that there was a flaw in the software.

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

New Vision Television is a broadcast company based in Southern California. The company owned over 60 television stations and targeted in upper level markets. The company has considerable viewers mainly on the west coast. In May, 2012, LIN Media announced an acquisition of 13 out of 63 television stations owned by New Vision for $342 million. The deal was approved very soon after the announcement. The acquisition involved agreements on operational control of three Broadcasting-owned stations and shared service of other 10 stations. In 2014, Lin Media was acquired by Media General.The deal was a small sized one, however the acquisition was in the same industry, which made the transaction more comparable.

That critical narrative was likely unavoidable even as we still don't know exactly how the breach occurred, so it's hard to assess just how sophisticated the attack against Equifax was but the reality is that, in today's threat environment, no business should consider itself immune from being

All the consumers affected were also made vulnerable to subsequent identity theft given malicious attackers stole their personal data. Equifax was directly affected since its stock began to plunge immediately the news was made public. Additionally, the corporate governance of the company was tarnished given three Equifax executives sold shares worth around $2 million days after the breach discovery, and the “retiring” of the chief security information officers is questionable (Surane & Melin, 2017). Also, the company was exposed to litigations with some lobbyists and interest groups pushing regulators to hold Equifax accountable for the negligence and poor treatment of affected consumers. The proposed new data security laws will present a greater burden to other corporations. Two such laws are the Promoting Responsible Oversight of Transactions and Examinations of Credit Technology (PROTECT), and Freedom From Equifax Exploitation (FREE) will attract more government scrutiny and limit the type of personal data that companies can collect from customers (Alperan, Carter, & Sofio, 2017).

In January of 2007 the parent company of TJMaxx and Marshalls known as TJX reported an IT security breach. The intrusion involved the portion of its network that handles credit card, debit card, check, and merchandise return functions. Facts slowly began to emerge that roughly 94 million customers’ credit card numbers were stolen from TJMaxx and Marshalls throughout 2006. It was believed that hackers sat in the parking lots and infiltrated TJX using their wireless network.