Essay about The Impact of the RSS Breach on Critical Infrastructure

This analysis discusses some issues and requirements to correct these issues that are outlined in the Turn Key University (TKU) data breach case study. In addition to these issues and requirements, some applicable laws will be discussed and some controls will be suggested for implementation.

The purpose of this meeting is to inform you of a security breach that occurred in our company, and to inform you of what has been affected, how we found out, and what measures have been used to correct and prevent this from happening again. The following is a bulleted list of relevant information related to the security breach.

On December 18, 2013, one of the security bloggers, Brian Krebs, posted in his blog that Target, one of the biggest US retailers, had suffered a massive data breach. The next day, Target announced that data from more than 40 million credit and debit card accounts had been stolen from its systems, and noting that they started a thorough investigation. Perhaps learning from Target’s mistakes, other organizations could achieve a goal of better protecting themselves and their customers’ information.

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.

In regards to the attack "at this point is best directed to Target." An expert with a global firm that assist companies responding to and mitigating breaches he said while he could not address the Target situation specifically, most companies — large and small — are generally under-prepared when they are faced with a breach. The most important thing is that the attack or breach be addressed quickly, to assist with getting information out to those whom are affected and to regulators, to bring in the right experts to address the breach (such as forensics experts who can stop cyberattacks) and to help preserve the public's trust in the

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.

Right now, 37% of Internet users in the US are surfing the web with outdated versions of Java (CSIS, 2015). For organizations that have not paid close attention to cybersecurity in the past, now is your wakeup call. According to a recently released study, the average cost of a data breach in the United States has climbed from $5.9 million to a staggering $6.5 million per breach (Ponemon, 2015). This is enough to not only hurt many organizations, but also cause irrevocable damage to their economic standings. The purpose of this paper is to examine what the root cause for most of these breaches are. From a review of the largest breaches in the past 5 years, I have come down to this conclusion: Unpatched software is single handedly costing American organizations billions of dollars every year in expensive and embarrassing security breaches.

In mid March 2011, spear phishing attack exploited an Adobe Flash vulnerability that was not patched at the time, and is considered as one of the worst attacks in 21st century. The RSA immediately reported that information stolen is related to SecurID two factor authentication products. The company has faced criticism of its approach and maintained secrecy by keeping attackers in the dark as much as possible. Later, in a conference call with analysts, RSA revealed that small groups of RSA employees were targeted through e-mail phishing displaying the title “Job Recruitment 2011” that landed in email-junk folder. The document is an excel sheet, resulting hackers to gain control of machines and access servers in RSA’s network. The excel sheet contained a zero-day installed through Adobe Flash vulnerability. Some hints were left when the thefts of RSA’s database mapping token serial numbers to the secret token seeds that were injected to make each one unique.

Just recently RSA, The Security Division of EMC discovered the Chinese-language Virtual Private Network (VPN) was

The massive security breach at TJX companies in 2005 has become a lesson in proper security in retail stores across the world. This breach that led to the loss of personal information on millions of customers is a direct result of inadequate security safeguards. Managing risk over critical information can always be tricky, but it is important to integrate security standards and privacy requirements across each company. TJX companies certainly put their customers information at risk by relying on weak encryption technology to protect this information. With the proper security measures, this record breaking data breach could have been avoided.

Many lessons can be learned from these breaches. First of all, the foundations of security need to be in place and reviewed very often to keep relevant in today's ever changing electronic world. Secondly, the people in charge need to understand the importance of their position and should be held accountable for any personal liabilities they may cause for the company through improper or inadequate performance or reporting. Another lesson is that the cost of prevention is worth so much more than the costs of dealing with the consequences. Each one of these examples have resulted in huge

China’s political situation allows them to pursue their interests in cyber space with little objections from the world’s superpowers. Even when questioned about their actions, the Chinese government continue to deny their involvement in security breaches of US security systems. To counter-act the allegations of China’s involvement, they show how other countries attack them first giving them an obligation to defend themselves. China is also free from overt scrutiny solely based upon the needs of China’s business and economy for US

Holbrook, E. (2010). The mother of all data breaches. Fore Front, 57(9), 1-3. Retrieved from http://eds.b.ebscohost.com/eds/pdfviewer/pdfviewer?vid=0&sid=ba3be2fe-248e-4be3-867c-0b7b83b50492%40sessionmgr103.

Organizations, on the other hand, are prime targets for social engineering attacks. As technological changes moves at such a rapid rate, many companies, especially, small businesses struggle to keep pace, and policies and procedures are developed haphazardly, if at all. However, information security poses a great risk and must be addressed if organizations are to avoid a range of unpleasant side-effects and sometimes significant financial losses. A 2007 study conducted by the Ponemon Institute on security breach revealed that “average total cost per reporting company was more than $6.3 million per breach and ranged from $225,000 to almost 35 million”. Moreover, according to an article published in one of the leading Information Security Magazines “85% of organizations experienced a data breach in 2008” (Raymond.Al, 2009).

In my opinion, the paper made me agree with many significant aspects in connecting several data breaches that were recently happened, along with some strategy insights that could be deployed to strengthen and prevent similar incidents in the future. Starting with the introduction, the author was informative in convincing me on the important and the impact of information security not only in the public and privet sector of a country, but in general by enlightening me about cyber security, its different forms, and the reasons why attackers perform it. Then, the author goes further in clarifying the situation regarding the UA breach, even when there were some questions about the motive behind it since the compromised information is not on