Target Data Breach Essay

In 2013, target corporation experienced a serious data breach where its security, as well as the payment system,was breached. The security breach was so intense in which case; it compromised over 40 million credit as well as debit card numbers. Furthermore, 70 million phone numbers, addresses, and other personal information was affected(Krebs, 2014).The attack was made without the knowledge of Target Corp. until mid-December when the department of defense notified the company that its system was being attacked. One problem that came out clear, in this case, was the fact that Target Corp. had been notified of the attack

Years later, the police arrived to inform him informed of a recent breach in the Heartland Cafe network. Detectives on the scene checked and analyzed for any possible vulnerabilities, where Tom confessed that his POS reseller, franchisor and POS reseller neglected to tell Tom to conform with the updated PTS requirements. The investigators learned that Tom’s scans originated from a different location and confirmed that the Heartland Cafe was a victim. While Tom was updating his security measures, he temporarily shut down Heartland Cafe in order to address this issue.

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

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.

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.

The attack on Home Depot in 2014 happened from hackers that retrieved stolen vendor login credentials which allowed access to home depot’s system. the hackers then install malware on home depot’s payment system, which helped the hackers steal the credit

The hackers were able to update the malware two times to strengthen their malware in order to extract data efficiently. The hackers managed to stay in Target’s network and move from one part of the network to the other without detection. The final stage of APT kill chain was data extraction. Data extraction in Targets case was done on many levels. First, the hackers were able to copy credit card credentials of previous shoppers. Secondly, hackers were able to steal phone numbers and addresses from Target’s reward program. Finally, hackers were able to steal credit card information as costumers were using the POS to finalize their shopping. 2. What were the significant breakdowns in Target’s security operations that may have intensified the magnitude and impact of the breach?There were many downfalls of Target’s security system that lead to the significance of the attack.i.Target did not perform security checks with the vendors to examine their security protocols such as using a free malware detection software that was not suitable for business

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.

Every good company will have checks and balances in place to prevent or stop mistakes from happening. The Target company had all the industry standard security technology and had also installed a malware detection tools a few months before the breach occurred. Human error was the main fault of Target being able to be breached. Target’s management and security team both failed to respond to system warnings of malware that has been detected.

Popular tech security website krebsonsecurity.com first reported a rumored data breach at Target on December 13 after receiving tips

One of the largest examples of a technological privacy violation in history was the Target data breach of 2013. The Target Corporation is one of the leading innovators of the retail industry. They introduced the concept of designer partnerships, making them one of the leading clothing stores in the country (Corporate Target 1). Unfortunately, the company was targeted by Russian hackers shortly before the Christmas of 2013. In this hack, personal information, including customer names, mailing addresses, phone numbers, email addresses and credit card information, of seventy million people was stolen and used for fraud (Forbes 1). This has raised concerns over how well the company can ensure that their consumer’s privacy is protected.

In December 2013, the CEO, Gregg Steinhafle, of Target announced that their company was affected by a data breach that occurred between November 27 and December 15, 2013. “Target disclosed that online thieves hacked into its computer system, stealing credit card or personal information from more than 100 million customers. Both personal data and credit card information may have been stolen from about 12 million people” (Abrams, 2014). The outcome of this breach has cost Gregg Steinhafle his job, as well as the trust of Target’s consumers, investors, and close to $150 million in breach-related costs. This breach is considered one of the largest retail data breaches in U.S. history due to the amount of personal data and credit card

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

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.

Point-of-sale terminals infected resulting in massive breaches. Another pattern, purpose of-offer (PoS) based malware has been the principle benefactor in Mastercard breaks in the previous four years – starting with Target and Home Depot. These breaks were the first to convey light to this pattern and recognize that cybersecurity experts expected to stay ready and careful. This pattern, the focusing of purpose of-offer terminals is a consequence of a couple of dubious components. As indicated by Chester Wisniewski, essential research researcher at Sophos, PoS sellers, "instead of attempting to secure PoS terminals and programming accurately, just disregard the issue and let the traders turn into the casualties" (Winder, 2016, para. 4). Moreover, he tends to the way that most merchants who oversee and offer terminals have not tried to refresh their security for over 20 years