Questions On Amazon, Apple, Google, And Honan Himself

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.

The Internet has vastly expanded the opportunities for identity theft. A particularly prevalent form of cyber theft is known as phishing. This occurs when cybercriminals use spam, e-mail, or other messages to trick people into submitting personal information. As phishing has become more sophisticated, criminals have developed ways to gain access to such data merely by having the user click on the link. Phishers often pool stolen information and sell it on the black market via online forums. Max Ray Vision ran one such site, CardMarkets.com. When Vision was arrested in 2007, computers in his home contained some 1.8 million stolen credit card and bank account numbers. This information allowed Vision and his associates to make more than $86 million in fraudulent purchases.

In December of 2013, target corporation faced a serious security breach where over 40 million credit cards were stolen from different target stores. This paper is going to explore the problem, the background information about the problem, the controls that could have been in place to prevent the issue, the intended plan of control and the associated risks involved.

This paper explores seven references that report the results from research conducted on-line regarding the 2013 Target breach. According to the website “Timeline of Target 's Data Breach And Aftermath: How Cybertheft Snowballed For The Giant Retailer” (2015), the breach occurred November and December 2013 in which customers who shopped at Target locations credit and debit cards were breached and their personal information was exposed. Upon their investigation, it was determined their point of sale system was hacked. “Wikipedia” states point of sale system which is used by third party vendors has cash registers as well as barcodes which stores customer’s information. The website “What is Packet Sniffer” (2016), Packet Sniffing may have been a way the attacked happened. “RAM Scraping Attack” website indicates what RAM means and how this type of attack happens. “What is a Firewall in Networking and How They Protect Your Computers” (2014), “What is Endpoint Security? Data Protection 101” and “Why SSL? The Purpose of using SSL Certificates” websites each provide ways to reduce and/or prevent future attacks.

This paper explores seven references that report the results from research conducted on-line regarding the 2013 Target breach. According to the website “Timeline of Target 's Data Breach And Aftermath: How Cybertheft Snowballed For The Giant Retailer” (2015), the breach occurred November and December 2013 in which customers who shopped at Target locations credit and debit cards were breached and their personal information was exposed. Upon their investigation, it was determined their point of sale system was hacked. “Wikipedia” states point of sale system which is used by third party vendors has cash registers as well as barcodes which stores customer’s information. The website “What is Packet Sniffer” (2016), Packet Sniffing may have been a way the attacked happened. “RAM Scraping Attack” website indicates what RAM means and how this type of attack happens. “What is a Firewall in Networking and How They Protect Your Computers” (2014), “What is Endpoint Security? Data Protection 101” and “Why SSL? The Purpose of using SSL Certificates” websites each provide ways to reduce and/or prevent future attacks.

On Dec 19, 2013 Target Corporation announced to the world that they had suffered a major data security breach. Due to Target Corporations poor stance on network security, hackers were able to steal over 40 million payment card records, encrypted PINs and 70 million customer records during the Black Friday sales week. Initial reports indicated that it was malware placed on their Point of Sales (POS) system, but that was just the tip of the iceberg of the breach. If there had been better security from the start this breach could have been avoided or greatly reduced.

Once on Target’s network with elevated privileges the attackers were able to launch malware to the POS systems that would capture the credit card information of the consumers as they swiped their cards to pay for their items. They launched a second piece of malware that that would take the captured information and move it to a dump server on the internal network. Once the information was on the dump server it them

The Target data breach remains one of the most notable breaches in history, it was the first time a CEO of a major corporation was fired due to a security event. The breach received an enormous amount of attention, it caused corporations and individuals to change the way they think about information security and data protection. Between Thanksgiving and Christmas 2013 hackers gained access to 40 million customer credit cards and personal data of 70 million Target customers. The intruders slipped in by using stolen credentials and from there gained access to vulnerable servers on Targets network to launch their attack and steal sensitive customer data from the POS cash registers. All this occurred without a response from Targets security operations center, even though security systems notified them of suspicious activity. The data was then sold on the black market for an estimated $53 million dollars. However, the cost to Target, creditors, and banks exceeded half of a billion dollars. This report will review how the infiltration occurred, what allowed the breach to occur including Targets response, and finally who was impacted by the security event.

When online commerce first emerged, many consumers were wary of supplying their credit cards and giving their personal information to online stores. This led to the development of websites such as Paypal, which restricts the access a retailer has to one’s credit card number (Einstein). The threat of fraud has always been a worry for online consumers, but consumers face the same threats when shopping in a brick and mortar store (Chadwick).

This is not yet properly known but as most hacks like this start with a phishing approach, which include sending messages to representatives to motivate them to tap on harmful software's or visit sites where malware is surreptitiously downloaded to their machines. Programmers likewise get into devices through loop holes in an organization's site that can give them access to backend databases. Once on an affected device in an organization's system, attackers can outline system and take Admin level passwords to access other ensured frameworks on the system and look out for important information to make it up to their advantage.

The next steps in this process are the added touches of concealment for their evil deeds. They immediately change the address for mailing to a new address so that the original owner does not get any items that are ordered delivered to them or notifications of the profile changes. Then they change the method of billing from paper to email with a factious email address. Now that they have completely altered everything on the profile page, the new profile in your account has been created and they have free access to shop on line. In a more devious act, lets add an extra step to this process. The criminal will first make a small purchase to test the waters to see if the transaction will go through. If so, the criminal will follow through with a much larger purchase that in some cases will max out the credit limit for this holder. The more advanced criminals who know how Company X’s credit program works, will make an online payment using an Automated Clearing House (ACH) process to pay the card off in full using fraudulent bank information. With the ACH, the credit line is tricked in assuming a payment has been made and opens up the full line of credit for additional purchases. In the next few days this process will continue and in about 48 hours when the ACH is declined due to an invalid account, the charges are reversed back to Company X. By this time, the credit limit has been cleared and maxed three or four times and the victim is unaware of all of this

The poor wireless network security allowed thieves to just stay around the store premises and intercept customers’ credit card information as they used their cards for transaction (Schuman, 2007). With the access to the wireless network, the thieves were able to use their access point to track the central database of the company. Reports also suggests that TJX was storing all its customer personal information along with credit card numbers in an unencrypted format which made it easy for thieves to simply download them. More than 45 million accounts were compromised and those credit card numbers were used by thieves to buy gift cards which then were used to exchange for goods and launder money through jewelry and electronic

For some individuals, hacking can be a hobby they like to undertake in order to analyze how many computers or the systems they can gain access to. While hacking seems harmless, there are those who do this vice maliciously so that they can get access to customer/ client information, the details of credit cards, their passwords, email addresses and identity fraud (Riem, 2001). Having this unauthorized access to these information warrants an arrest, and should the criminals be found, they are liable for their crimes.

Amazon faces threats that the company cannot ignore. First, the company has competition from various rivals, which include Salesforce.com, eBay, Wal-Mart stores, Best Buy, Apple, Netflix, International Business Machines, Barnes and Nobles, among many others. For example, Wal-Mart introduced a shipping policy to compete with Amazon’s Prime membership service. With this new policy, customers receive free two-day shipping on all orders of $35 or more. Second, cybercrime is present and Amazon should find ways to ensure that it always guarantees that customer privacy and security are protected.

Amazon.com is a vast internet based enterprise that sells books, music, movies, housewares, electronics, toys, and many other goods, either directly or as the middleman between other retailers and Amazon.com’s millions of customers. Its Web services business includes renting data storage and computing resources, so-called “cloud computing,” over the Internet. Its considerable online presence is such that, in 2012, 1 percent of all Internet traffic in North America traveled in