Personal Record Breach

The United States Office of Personnel Management published an announcement in the month of June in 2015, that its office has been the object of ridicule from a high-level cyber-attack. This office is the section for the United States government, which oversees the federal government’s civil services (Lee, 2015). The department manages the security okays necessary for numerous of jobs in the government that oversees top-secret approvals for the armed forces in the United States. Five point six million people fingerprint information was stolen this is a fivefold upsurge since the former approximation of 1.1 million. The infringement of information would have a bearing on twenty-two million individuals that comprised confidential

Database security and protection is a significant concern for organizations across the world, evidenced by the number of reported incidents with regards to unauthorized exposure to sensitive information. As the amount of data that organizations collect, retain and share continues to escalate, so does the importance of having a strong database security. The Privacy Rights Clearinghouse, a website that keeps track of data breaches that were reported by companies, according to its research more than 159 million records were breached in 2015 through the course of 226 separate breach events. With the loss of unprotected data, can result in steep expenses for a company such as legal fees, call centers, customer losses, and the ambiguous amount of bad publicity. A Forrester Research survey concluded that an average security breach can cost a company between $90 and $305 per lost record. Given the increase number of data breaches, there is a corresponding need to properly plan ways to better protect and monitor the database systems through access control, SQL injection prevention, and encryption of data.

Security breaches and incidents cost business an average of $2.7 million each year (White, 2014). With this we see a giant financial impact of breaches also increase. Since 2013 the financial impact has increased 34% up until 2014 (White, 2014). While attacks on national stats were also increase by 86% in 2014 with the targets primarily focusing on gas and oil, aerospace and defense, technology, and telecommunications sector (White, 2014). While attacks on these targets are usually the result of competitors within their fields.

Any organization is critically dependent on data to perform its functions. Security breaches resulting from malicious code attacks, denial of service, employee negligence and theft, unauthorized access, policy violations, (ROCHA, 2012) and vendor leaks and mistakes, are on the increase. There was a total of nine mega breaches in 2015 as reported by Symantec which reported an alarming 429 million exposed identities ("Cyber Security Incident Response: Shifting from Reactive to Proactive | Ayehu", 2016) .In the light of the above fact, it becomes not a question of if, but when a compromise will occur (Williams, 2015, pg.1) A security breach has disastrous impact on an organization as it leaves in its wake financial, legal and compliance and reputational risk. The health and financial services sector incur most costly data breaches because of higher fines ad above average rate of lost in business and customers (Ponemon, 2016). According to Ponemon (2016), majority of data breaches results from malicious and criminal attacks which take considerable time to detect and contain and has thus have a higher remediation cost. It is worthy to mention the Office of Personnel Management breach, where they could not put their fingers on what was taken during the breach which generates distrust among affected parties. The Sony and the OPM breach increasingly makes it clear that attackers use anti-forensic and evidence destroying

There has been a significant rise in information security incidents (Leakage of knowledge, valuable corporate information, personal information, etc.) over the years that compromise the confidentiality, integrity and availability of information and information assets of a particular organization and lead to a significant financial losses, reputational damage, operational downtime, loss of

The internet plays a huge part in the modern economy, yet, because of negligence many corporations mass of information is put at risk. According to a study conducted in 2015 by Tech Beacon, there were 223 publicly reported data breaches in 2015. This may not seem like a large number, but keep in mind that mainly large corporations report public breaches. Corporations like BlueCross Blueshield, Sony, Target, Ebay, and Home Depot all had data

As the sources and complexity of data breaches continue to increase, so does the cost to organizations. In 2016, the Aberdeen Group estimated the average cost of downtime was $260,000 per hour, a figure that represents a 60% increase from the 2014 average. Even businesses with a 99.9% uptime will lose almost 9 hours a year, which has a potential downtime cost of over $2 million. Combine this with the Ponemon Institute’s finding that the average cost of a breach is $4 million. Improving security is a financial imperative.

Target, Neiman Marcus, and even eBay have been victims of breaches involving their customer’s sensitive information. Identity theft is becoming all too common as entire dossiers of individuals who have done nothing more than purchase something online are shared, sometimes for as little as a dollar ("Follow the Data: Dissecting Data Breaches and Debunking the Myths," 2015). Incidents happen when a company doesn’t maintain physical security of a device, such as a laptop, or when unauthorized individuals obtain access to databases.

Accidental release of confidential data has been running rampant. Healthcare employees have accidentally sent patients’ records to wrong email addresses due to typing errors. The University of Greenwich and Hellgate High School have accidentally publicly released hundreds of students’ personal protected information instead of the intended meetings’ notes. US and UK government laptops and USB sticks containing unencrypted personal protected information have been accidentally lost. All of these cases attribute the cause of the data loss to “human error”. Are humans solely responsible for accidental data loss or do processes and technology play equal roles?

Today’s economy depends on the secure flow of information within and across organizations. Thus, making information security is an issue of vital importance. A secure and trusted environment for stored and shared information greatly enhances consumer benefits, business performance and productivity, and national security. Conversely, an insecure environment creates the potential for serious damage to governments and corporations that could significantly undermine consumers and citizens. The stakes are particularly high for businesses engaged in critical activities, such as electrical power generation, banking and finance, or healthcare.

The greatest percentage of thefts of private information is from incorrectly stored backup tapes, external hard drives, or laptops. Existing laws order companies to alert affected individuals of a potential breach of their data. It is expected that the price tag of the typical breach of educational data will span from $210,000 to as much as $4 million from the costs of notifying affected individuals alone (Custer, 2010).

The computer systems being used in Government agencies, retail stores, military agencies etc. are usually observed as the most likely targets of cyberattacks. The hacking of government computers reported in the mid of 2015 is a blatant case of cyberattack where the personal data of about a quarter millions of people in US were found to be exposed. The reports released by the office of Personnel management, every person who has cooperated with the background check for at least past 15 years is confirmed to be affected. As per the agency reports, sensitive information including financial and health history, addresses and other private details of around 20 million people who were put to a government background check including their friends and spouses, were purloined by the hackers. US has already witnessed a security breach when the personnel data of around 5 million federal employees in the early 2015’s. Though the administration officials haven’t pinpointed a

In today’s generation, the complications that come along with cyber security are no longer just for the technologically advanced population; it is everybody’s concern. Whether you work in arts, military, media, and even business – this is an essential part of our lives that we should inspect carefully. A report published by Researcher Riley Walters states that a survey by the Ponemon Institute showed “the average cost of cybercrime for U.S. retail stores more than doubled from 2013 to an annual average cost per company of successful cyber-attacks increased to $20.8 million in financial services, $14.5 million in the technology sector, and $12.8 million in communications industries.” There were cyber-attacks earlier this year which led to the leak of eBay employee log-ins, allowing access to 233 million eBay accounts. Cyber-attacks like these are almost impossible to detect, and there are no measures to recover from them. With the increasing number of computers, cybercrime is also on the rise, hence close attention is recommended to protect personal information.

A business trend has been changing and adapting new technology to enhance the business success but also this new technology put public information in a high risk. According to the video there are some 26 million small businesses which attention to the dangers of cyber crime. The private personal information (PPI) such as electronic commerce social security number, account number, User Ids, Payroll, Internet Transactions, passport number, employee databases home address, credit card, etc. are in risk. The information security should meet many purposes such as protecting people information, unauthorized access, disclosure, and any kind of modification. Moreover, information security also provides defines the company consensus baseline stance on security; help minimize risk; and help track compliance with regulations and legislation (Diver, 2006). According to Chris Duckett more than 65% of transaction

Any organization is critically dependent on data to perform its functions. Security breaches resulting from malicious code attacks, denial of service, employee negligence and theft, unauthorized access, policy violations, (ROCHA, 2012) and vendor leaks and mistakes, are on the ascendancy. Symantec reported a total of nine mega breaches in 2015, which indicated an alarming 429 million exposed identities ("Cyber Security Incident Response: Shifting from Reactive to Proactive | Ayehu", 2016) .In the light of the above fact, it becomes not a question of if, but when a compromise will occur (Williams, 2015, pg.1) A security breach has disastrous impact on organizations as it leaves in its wake financial, legal and compliance and reputational risk. The health and financial services sector incur most costly data breach because of higher fines and above average rate of lost in business and customers (Ponemon, 2016). According to Ponemon (2016), majority of data breaches results from malicious and criminal attacks which take considerable time to detect and contain and has thus had a higher remediation cost. It is worthy to mention the Office of Personnel Management breach, where they could not determine what was taken during the breach which generated a lot of distrust among those affected. The Sony and the OPM breach makes it make it abundantly clear that attackers use anti-forensic and evidence destroying techniques which makes