Hacked Belonging

What: 43 million records which include usernames, hashed passwords, email addresses and also ad-related data of users were hacked

According to the Federal Trade Commission Identity theft is the fastest growing crime in the United States of America. They estimated that 10 million people a year are victimized by the crime which comes out to about 19 people per minute are becoming victims of this crime. Given these extremely worrying statistics it has never been more important to be informed about the crime of identity theft and how to avoid it in your daily life especially as more schemes and ways to unknowingly forfeit your information are introduced with the prevalence of the World Wide Web (www, w3). More than just knowledge of the crime of identity theft it is also important to know what protections you can set to help protect your information. Also, given the amount of businesses and organizations, and the various vulnerabilities that their systems may have, that must have access and know significant information about your life it is also invaluable to understand how to recover from your information being lost. This paper will be used to inform about this growing crime including what identity theft is and the different types that exist, what information is most important to protect, what you can do to avoid it, how to recover from it and what that may entail, and how this applies to the field of computer science and what should be looked for when building systems, and different kinds of attacks that can happen.

The word hacking, usually associated with information technology, is a term used for the development of creative solutions for a problem by someone in a non-professional environment. With the introduction of personal computers and the internet, anyone could create solutions to problems in computer science. This led to the emergence of “hacker culture”, leading to the decentralization of computer industry (Hicks, 2014).

Hacking has evolved from juvenile’s curious action into serious criminal act. The low cost of computers and ease of accessing internet has allowed proliferation of criminals to use these tools to research and attack their targets. The main goal is criminal exploit and to exploit learn hacking techniques to accomplish goal. The use of electronic devices and internet leave behind digital marks and fortunately criminal first hackers have a difficult time erasing their trail allowing for the savvy digital forensics investigator to collect evidence and locate the criminal.

In 2014, one the country’s largest home improvement companies Home Depot was attacked by hackers. The hackers used a vendor’s stolen log-on credentials to penetrate through the company’s network and installed a custom built malware that stole credit card data and email addresses. The attack allowed the hackers to gain access to 56 million credit and debit cards in the US and Canada, and another 53 million e-mail address were also stolen.

I must admit that I had no idea how much access to my personal information other individuals have. Usually when you sign up for a specific website it is easy to believe that you are protected, and that it is private. Reality is that other people may have access to it and the thought of it is pretty scary. Identity theft has become a terrible but not unusual crime lately. A couple months ago I received a call from “Bank of America,” asking me for my personal information including my birthday and my social. I immediately hung up because I knew it was a scam, BOA never makes those calls they usually just send a new card in the mail if necessary. This past weekend I experienced another interesting incident. My father picked up the mail like he

The amount of vulnerability in security occurring in United States every year is immense. Based on the statistic given by figure 1, in year 2014 alone, 12.7 million of Americans were victims of identity theft. One in every five Americans were victim of password vulnerability and they were affected by high profile data breach.

Hackers are extremely clever at finding ways to get their hands on what they want. In some cases, this can include the most personal of information. According to a recent report published by the Identity Theft Resource Center, “More than 368 big data breaches have been reported in the first half of 2014” (Srinivasan 1). These are more than just individual breaches as each database may include thousands of people in each. With each case being on such large scales, the magnitude of these breaches is extremely massive. The identities and data of the people in these databases were at extreme risk. In 2011, there was a huge attack on Sony’s PlayStation Network. At the time, there was a huge amount of people – about 77 million – that

Identity theft has been a major issue of privacy and fraud. In the data breach analysis from the Identity Theft Resource Center (2013), the number of data breaches from the year 2005 to 2012 increased. In 2012, there had been 49% where the data breach exposed people Social Security Number. The data breach of 2012 has a rate of 27.4% caused by hackers. These breaches were commonly from 36.4% businesses and 34.7% health and medical (Identity Theft Resource Center 2013). The number of identity theft varies from physical possession to digital possession. At least one-fifth of trash cans contains papers listing people’s credit card number and personal information. People that throw away their

Between the period of November 27th to December 15th 2013, over 11 gigabytes of data, personal and credit card details from 70 million customers was stolen. The details were stolen mainly through the hacking of Point of Sale (POS) machines, however there was a clear structure to the attack as shown below.

In an age where technology holds all of people’s personal information, one would think computer security would be nearly impregnable. However, this is not true and data breaches are commonplace in society. Hacking and identify fraud happen every day, and as technology becomes more integrated into everyday life, organizations and corporations need to ameliorate cybersecurity. Computer security should be vastly improved because of the increasing complexity of hacking and data breaches, which has a massive impact on companies and governments as well as the average person.

Back in 2011, there was a major online attack that involved the Sony PlayStation online gaming service, PS Network and the compromise of 77 million users’ personal information. This was one of the largest corporation attacks within the last 10 years involving so many accounts. The attack took place between April 17th and 19th when an illegal and unauthorized person gained access to the personal account server and stole the information. What made this attack so much more important than just the amount was what was stolen during the attack. It did not just usernames and gamer tags, but the actual account owner’s name, address, email, birthday, password, login and security questions. With this information, the attacker was able to gain access

The media is full of stories of hacking doing untold damage estimated in the millions of dollars. On the same note, identity theft is a major global problem and despite numerous efforts by governments to ensure citizens do not fall prey to fraudsters, the human condition remains the weakest link in information security hence, social engineering thrives under these circumstances.

Although the internet has given society, multitudinous betterments of our standards of living, the people privately relinquish all our personal information to, also are unprosperous in safeguarding our information. Veritably, as we become, especially Americans, fitting to wanting the utmost convenient technology, without help open numerous opportunities for hackers. Furthermore, if a hacker found a household made this year it would have a security system that’s connected to your phone, oven, TV, internet provider, computers, watch, etc. Moreover, if our own selves are to protect people’s information today, at this point organizations who are making electronics need a larger security team or the innovation encompassing internet security needs to advance.

in partial fulfillment of requirement for the award of the degree of Bachelor of Technology