How Does Network Security Work?

Even though Target is ranked currently 36 in the fortune 500 companies and have over 1750 stores, they are still very susceptible to being a victim of a cyber attack. In 2013, Target fell victim to a security breach on their system. Roughly around Thanksgiving of 2013, someone had installed malware in Target’s security and payment system enabling the hackers to steal credit card and personal information. “Six months earlier the company began installing a $1.6 million malware detection tool made by the computer security firm FireEye, whose customers also include the CIA and the Pentagon.” (BloombergBusiness) In place was a very effective security system. However, when the attacked happen on November 30, FireEye spotted the hackers and Bangalore (a third party cyber security company hired by Target) that alerted the IT team at corporate office in Minneapolis. There was no response from Target’s Corporate IT team and therefore led to 40 million credit card numbers and 70 million addresses, phone numbers and other personal

A direct cyberattack in 2014 to JPMorgan Chase caused a compromised of accounts effecting a total of 76 million households and seven million small businesses. We are clearly, in times when consumer confidence in the digital operations of corporate America is on shaky ground. In directly, banking is taking the brunt of the fallout but major stores also have breaches which of course are directly related to their financial data. Store like, Target, Home Depot and a number of other retailers have experienced major data breaches. 40 million cardholders and 70 million others were compromised at Target alone in 2013 and an attack at Home Depot in September, 2013 affected 56 million cardholders.

Even though Target is ranked currently 36 in the fortune 500 companies and have over 1750 stores, they are still very susceptible to being a victim of a cyber attack. In 2013 Target fell victim to a security breach on their system. Roughly around Thanksgiving of 2013 someone had installed malware in Target’s security and payment system enabling the hackers to steal credit card and personal information. “Six months earlier the company began installing a $1.6 million malware detection tool made by the computer security firm FireEye, whose customers also include the CIA and the Pentagon.” (BloombergBusiness) In place was a very effective security system, but when the attacked happen on November 30, FireEye spotted the hackers and Bangalore, a third party cyber security company hired by Target alerted the IT team at corporate office in Minneapolis. There was no response from Target’s Corporate IT team and therefore led to the 40 million credit card numbers and 70 million addresses, phone numbers

Also one has to know what type of network has been worked on, what network topologies the security is going on. The ring topology is going to be different from a bus or star topology. The hybrid is going to be different from the mesh topology or even wireless, this can be one of the hardest networks to protect. Also one has to think about size when it comes to building a network. Most people most of the time can’t tell the different between a big network and a small network. Big networks mostly consist of multiple several servers, computers and other device which connects to the network from the outside. All these devices need to be protected or secured when it’s connected to the internet and the network. Big networks are used mostly in bigger institution and organization where by 30 or more computers and server are used and are all linked to the network. Also speed is a factor when it comes to the internet networks but most importantly it’s important to bigger institutions and companies. Policy is one thing that most organization needs because if they want their network and the use of internet to be secured. Policies have to cover all aspect that the network is in. There has to be a lot of thought put in and all devices and how they connect to the outside world has to be considered. Small networks sometimes don’t have benefits and the down fall bigger networks have. Although speed is a factor, one

The Target Corporation has undergone many changes due to the 2013 security breach where hackers stole personal information from credit and debit cards of at least 70 million customers. Target sales and reputation has dropped from this instance, thus eliciting changes in their security systems, changes in management, and a few policy changes in handling customer information. With the public eye on the corporation’s handling of the situation, Target has been communicating these changes through various means. The changes they needed to communicate were informing customers of the security breach, addressing the bad press coverage to shareholders, downsizing of employees, and

Besides the basic physical security of a site, the next most important aspect is controlling digital access into and out of the organization’s network. In most cases this means controlling the points of connectivity to the outside world, typically the Internet. Partitioning the boundary between the outside Internet and the internal intranet is a critical security piece. Any services not actually needed should be turned off so that they will not become avenues of attack for security threats. Different systems will have different services running by default.

As a business becomes larger it is important to formalize certain aspects so that they can be applied similarly across all employee and situations. “Policies can be considered business rules and are mandatory, the equivalent of organization-specific law…” (quote from SANS 524.1 Security Policy awareness) Policies will vary from business to business in order to suit their needs. Here are some ideas to help a business’s create policies to defend against cyber attack.

What do Premara Blue Cross, Anthem, Chick-fil-A, Sony, USPS, MCX, Staples, Kmart, Dairy Queen, SuperValue, Jimmie John's, Viator, Home Depot, PF Chang's, Community Health Systems, and JP Morgan all have in common? Each of these companies were hacked during 2014-2015. Sadly, this is just a short list showing the breadth of industries and size of operations that are vulnerable. According to Time Magazine in March, 2015, "You're not just imagining it: Lately, a new data breach has been reported almost every week."

The Home Depot and Target have been one of the many retail establishments cyber attack breaches that have being targeted by cyber attackers. The Home Depot was the target of a cyberattack payment card system breach where their credit card information was basically stolen on September of 2014. The attacked occurred by attackers gaining third party credentials in order to gain access to the system, after they gained access to the system they weakened the system gaining their own access privileges. After doing all the mentioned above, malware was installed quickly on Home Depot’s self-check-out system. All these steps where taking by the cyber attackers resulting in the loss of more than fifty million credit card accounts and email addresses.

The cause of this data leak was a well-executed plan of attack by using and exfiltration malware program that moved customer’s stolen credit card numbers and details into drop locations and then the hackers retrieved the data from these locations spread all over the US. However despite FireEye (Targets $1.6 million malware detection tool) spotting this malware and notified the security team as says *** “Nothing happened”. This non-responsive action to the 11GB worth of data being leaked from their mainframes. As a result of this Target experienced more than 140 lawsuits filed towards them by customers and banks due this negligence and compensatory damages. The total costs exceeding $61 million responding to the breach and Targets profit during the Christmas period had fell 46%. Target was not the only victim to this data breach it caused banks to refund customers more than $200 million due to their stolen money by these hackers. Furthermore many customers were experiencing identity theft, this being a major implication for all individuals affected this data breach as now many customers will need new credit card details and identity to be fixed by this data

The major retailer Target had an online security breach in 2013, which resulted in a loss on $3.2 million dollars in a single day. Almost 4 million credit card and debit card information were compromised Hackers infiltrated(DdoS) the servers of the online store during peak shopping time and implemented several bots to mislead customers to put their credit card information into a wrong location. Within hours all the information was recorded and this led to the biggest credit card fraudulence in recent times. What to take away from this incident? Not even the major corporations are safe from cyber attacks and lack better cyber security. Retailers’ revenue lost to online fraud increased over the past two years to reach an estimated $3.5 billion, an up of 3% from $3.4 billion in 2011(Cybersource 2013). A pie chart below demonstrates the distributions of the targets due in cyber

Target a large retail corporation that operates over 1,700 stores across the United States. They also operate as an online retailer at target.com. In 2012 the retailer earned more than $73 billion dollars in revenue and grew their sales by 5.1% from the previous year. Looking at the revenue and sales growth rate it is hard to fathom that more money could not be spent to ensure that consumer data is protected as much as possible. As information security specialists one of the worst things that can happen is our network gets infiltrated and customer information is stolen. On December 19, 2013 Target released a statement stating that they have had an information

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

I have worked for Target for about 3 years now and one of the major challenges that I have seen the corporation face was the data breach in the company nationwide. There was a security breach into the database of Target on December 15, 2013 and the attackers had access to over 50 million customer’s information including names, addresses, phone numbers, passwords, debit and credit card information. Target is a large retail corporation that operates at least about 1,800 plus stores across the U.S. and they also operate online, and as much as the organization revenue grows it seems like it is hard for the corporation to comprehend that more money should be spent to ensure that the consumer data is protected. “In mid-December 2013, we learned

Network security has changed significantly over the past years. There is more and more data to monitor and analyze in order to detect the activity of your data and systems. Securing a network has many variables. Password authentication, network access, patches, anti-virus protection, intrusion detection, firewall and network monitoring tools are just a few of the things you can do to protect yourself.