It is almost impossible to find the top reasons why most security breaches happen on a secure network compromising hundreds to thousands of users’ personal information. This happens today more often than one would like to think and the consequences are astronomical for users, employees and customers of the companies. To protect a network and thoroughly secure confidential information, one has to examine the top vulnerabilities and think outside of the normal box to protect the network. When a security breach happens, there is usually a pretty simple reason why it has happened. This paper will discuss one of the highly publicized security breaches to happen in years, the Sony PlayStation Network & Qriocity music and video service that …show more content…
Finally a third incident happened involving the loss of 2,500 user’s names and addresses which was determined to have be a leak from the electronics division of Sony. (www.frost.com/prod/servlet/market-insight-to[.pag?docid=233020589). A total of three security breaches in three weeks amounted in over 100 million users having their personal information stolen makes customers’ faith in Sony grow to an all time low. Millions of customers are asking how this could have happened and what is Sony doing to recover from this. There are many issues that could have led to Sony’s breach in security which include: • Deploying the right security products – IT security today has a wide range of technologies that are aimed specifically at lowering risks and threats. • Coping with business growth and expansion – While companies are acquiring others at a rapid rate of speed to drive growth for businesses, these companies are letting their information management systems lag behind in growth. • The nature of the breaches – Sony is still having ongoing investigations into why their security breach happened, application-layer attacks attributed to the first two breaches. This makes one wonder if Sony took the appropriate measures when structuring their security defenses against such attacks. Safeguarding personal information has become more difficult than ever before with so many services on the internet that require you to enter your personal information for many
Even after the attack, when the company did not know whether the customer information, which included credit card information, the company had no intention to announce the security breach to the public. This can be detrimental to the company if customers became
Sony has multiple networks, but the PlayStation Network has over 77 million users. In April 2011, Sony characterized a security breach as an “illegal and unauthorized intrusion” of the Sony networks. In fact, there was a series of breaches by different groups of hackers. The information provided by registered users, including usernames, passwords, names, and addresses, was compromised. In addition, the credit card information of users who make online purchases may have been compromised. Sony did not announce this information until a week after the last breech. The network was shut down after the last of the breaches.
A root-cause analysis of the security breach revealed multi-factorial issues at the technical, individual, group, and organizational levels. At the technical level, the applications and web-tools
A data breach incident which happened in 2014 could cost Sony Corp. $8 million in settlements, Bloomberg reported. The data breach happened when North Korean hackers were angered by "The Interview", a film that was centered around a fictional plot to eliminate Kim Jong-Un. Sony is reportedly going to pay $4.5 million to former and existing employees, while the lawyers who handled the case are expected to get $3.5 million.
Most of the parts of the assets affected include the computer's software and networks used by the company. This incident was detected in the month of February and as part of the Anthem, Inc. responsibility a formal warning was given right after detecting a possible breach to our software and network, but the hackers had already accessed some of our data.
The Target Corporation was exploited in December 2013 and then again in 2015. These breaches included customer’s personal identifying information and retailer’s data. This credit card data breach is a prime example of weak security and infrastructure. This breach happened over the course of one of the United States’ major holiday seasons, Christmas. The security issue involved hackers accessing Target’s customer 's credit and debit cards by the machines that were being used to swipe the cards. These hackers accessed Target’s network with a stolen username and password from a company that was providing refrigeration and HVAC services. This company could access Target’s network `remotely to monitor energy consumption and temperatures. With that, the hackers uploaded malware software on the Target’s credit card machines. The customer data hack happened across the nation, and it was performed in stores and not an online breach of Target customer information.
Statistics show that most security breaches are direct results of insider misconduct rather than being hacked. According to the most recent Verizon Data Breach Investigations Report, about “285 million records were compromised in 2008.” Seventy-four percent of the incidents were from inside sources. Users are more likely to be victims of computer virus infections, inquisitive students/co-workers, and hardware failures than to be victims of an Internet security attack.
This case study, written in 2009 is not the only case where a major data breach has occurred within organizations. In the late 2011 Sony’s PlayStation Network (PSN) was breached impacting up to 77 million user’s accounts including data on names, address and possibly credit card details. In late 2013 Target had a cyber-attack that compromised a large quantity of its data and had 110 million accounts compromised. Finally in September 2014 Apple had their iCloud server breached by hacking that compromised all the users of the online server. These occurrences still have some unanswered questions and several experts have yet to decipher the actual reason as to why the security breach occurred.
In January 2007, TJX Companies Inc. released a statement to the press that an estimated 40 million of their customer’s credit card accounts had been compromised (although final reports state that over 94 million accounts were affected) (Berg 2008). Through the company’s POS (Point of Sales) system, credit card information was stolen by a ring of hackers and approximately $4.5 billion spent on these cards (Berg 2008). What the hackers did was intercepted the credit card information from customers who swiped their cards at the store and then created their own physical cards using this information. Then they sold the credit cards to people, who turned around and used these cards at retail stores, like Walmart (Agrawal 2011). Three areas of weakness within the company’s IT systems that allowed for an attack of this scale were: inadequate wireless security, improper storage of customer data and failure to encrypt customer account data (Berg 2008).
Michael’s Store, Inc. is an arts & crafts Retail chain. It has more than 1040 stores located in 49 US states & Canada. The company also owns and operates the Aaron brother’s retail chain, which happens to have an additional 115 stores across the Country. Michael’s store Inc. had a Security breach, which took place between May 8, 2013 and January 27, 2014. About 2.6 million cards or about 7 percent of payment cards used at its stores during the period were affected. Alarmingly, its subsidiary Aaron brothers also had been breached between June 26, 2013 and February 27, 2014. It was reported that Aaron brothers had 400,000 cards impacted. The duration of the treacherous attack in total was 8 months (Schwartz, 2014). In this report, security breach of Michael’s store Inc. is analyzed. The topics covered are how the breach occurred, what did the authorities do to educate the customers & how in future such attacks can be avoided.
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 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.
The public was told of the breach on Dec 8th. It wasn’t until Dec 15th when they finally looked into the cause and fixed it. They sent out an e-mail to everyone, who they had emails for, about the breach. When they put out their response the main phrase everyone wanted
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).
In the last decade it’s amazing how technology has advanced over the years and will continue to advance for many years to come. Every year there is a new cell phone from Apple or Samsung, with new features that make our lives more convenient. From faster software to higher picture quality and so on. I am unable to recall the last time I used a camera to take pictures or went to the bank to deposit a check. Technology advances every day and many can’t wait to see what’s next to come. But with new technology comes greater risk for violations of privacy. In the following research paper I will discuss the types of security breaches and the cost associated with these breaches that businesses around the world face on a daily basis.