Payment Card Systems Were Breached

An unauthorized and highly sophisticated malware that not been encountered previously by any security company attacked the point-of-sale systems where all the card information is stored. The outcome of this hacking been extensive and affected millions of customer’s personal and payment data was exposed, results in the payment card compromise of three million customers.

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

Target’s response to the breach was not appropriate and they did not handle the whole situation with integrity. From not being forthcoming when the breach

The second security breach case is of Barnes & Noble. In September 2012, hackers stole credit card information of customers who shopped at sixty-three Barnes & Noble stores across the United States, which included New York City, San Diego, Miami and Chicago. The company discovered customer information had been stolen but kept the incident quiet per the request of the Justice Department so the F.B.I. could find out who was behind the intrusion (Huffington Post, 2012).

In the middle of the holiday season, Target shoppers were knocked off their feet with the news that in December 2013 that 40 million Target credit card numbers had been stolen (Krebs, 2013f) by someone accessing Target’s data on their point of sale (POS) systems (Krebs, 2014b). To make matters worst Target later revised their number to include the private data for 70 million of their customers (Target, 2014). The breach took place period of November 27 through December 15th 2013 (Clark, 2014). Target had gotten taken for over 11 GB of their data that had been stolen (Poulin, 2014). Target did not catch their internal alerts and was informed about the breach when they were contacted by the Department of Justice (Riley, Elgin,

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

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

(April 2015) today our financial and personal information is everywhere. It is in our phones for mobile payments, in our wallets on our credit cards and in the data centers and clouds of the companies and third parties that complete transactions on our behalf. With so much personal information—quite literally—floating around various access points, it has never been more lucrative or easy for cyber-criminals to access and mine private information to sell on the black market.The Target data breach at the end of 2013, which affected the card payment information of more than 40 million shoppers and the personal data of almost 70 million consumers, kick-started a continuous barrage of point-of-sale (POS) attacks affecting consumers, businesses and banks throughout 2014. Between the breaches at Dairy Queen, Home Depot and Neiman Marcus, it seemed like cyber-criminals were always one step ahead of the game, using malware and card-skimming techniques to gain access to confidential

On September 8th, 2014, Home Depot claimed that they had experienced a data breach that impacted its payment card system. In order to enter one of Home Depot’s vendor environments, the hackers stole third-party vendor login credentials by using phishing emails. Then they acquired an elevated right that allowed them to penetrate Home Depot’s computer network and install a unique and custom-built malware on the company’s self-checkout systems in the U.S. and Canada. The malware was able to evade detection by antivirus software over five months and to steal 56 million credit and debit card details as well as 53 million email addresses, making it one of the biggest breaches in 2014.

Founded in 1978 by Arthur Banks and Bernie Marcus, who were both fired from a local hardware store after a disagreement with their supervisor (http://founderbios.com/bernie-marcus.php), Home Depot opened its first store in Atlanta, Georgia on June 22, 1979 (www.corporate.homedepot.com). The founders had a vision to create a big-box retail chain that empowered customers to take on their own home improvement and repair projects. As the fourth largest retailer in the U.S. and the world’s largest home improvement retailer

On January 2007 a press release was issued according to CPA journal article “Analyzing the TJ Maxx Data Security Fiasco” that TJX Companies, Inc. the parent company to retail stores like TJ Maxx, Marshalls, HomeGoods, and A.J Wright stores; computer systems had been breached and that customers’ information had been stolen. (Berg, G. 2008, August) This data breach became the largest one of it’s kind because during the investigation there was reported that approximately 94 million Visa and MasterCard accounts had been compromised (Berg, G. 2008, August).

Target inappropriately handled this crisis because the company waited to report the data breach until days after it initially learned about it, which gave the public the impression that Target was being dishonest. On December 15th, 2013 Target initially learned of the breach in security, and on December 19th Target confirmed the data breach to the public. In Target’s initial statement, it claimed “There is no indication that PIN numbers have been compromised on affected bank issued PIN debit cards or Target debit cards” (Steinhafel, 2013). On December 27th, Target retracted its statement, and stated, “our ongoing investigation determined that strongly encrypted PIN data was removed from our system during the data breach incident” (Target,

In December 2013 we have noticed the target Data breach which resulted in affecting the 40 million credit and debit cards, which was thought one of the biggest data breach .Because of this breach 70 million accounts have been compromised leaking the security information of the people like phone numbers and address . But this year we have noticed the Home Depot breach which is much greater than the target breach ,which compromised 56 million cards.

PoSeidon is malware that is aimed at exploiting PoS machines to illegally obtain customers’ debit card and credit card information. The two biggest victims of PoSeidon have been Target, who was attacked in 2013 and lost information of up to 110 million customers (Alaimo, 2015), and Home Depot in 2014 that lost up to 56 million records (Krebs, 2014). This malware is a serious threat to every business that uses POS machines to conduct business. PoSeidon attacks a part of the POS machine that many people did not recognize was a potential vulnerability. According to Lucian Constantin, the PoSeidon malware used a method called “memory scraping”, which scanned the Random Access Memory (RAM) for credit and debit card information that was not encrypted. With the information sitting on the RAM of the PoS machine unencrypted, it was wide open to an attack that put millions of customers’ information at risk. Although RAM only stores the information for a limited amount of time until that space is needed for another task, the information can stay on the RAM long enough for the