The Security Of A Network

Despite the presence of network security devices such as firewalls and other security appliances, today's corporate networks are still vulnerable to both internal and external attacks by hackers intent on creating havoc. By proactively

In this modern day and age of computing, networks are a huge part of IT. It is important now more than ever that data sent over any network, whether it be a LAN (Local Area Network) or WAN (Wide Area Network; The Internet) is kept safe, private (when required) and uninterrupted in

Linton (2011, p.44) stated that hacking of network of common users and attacking their personal computers is one of the most threatening problems at present. It is happening in every second that results in a loss in several ways like loss of credentials, personal information etcetera. Although the use of personal computers and the internet has been increased rapidly, numbers of users who are the expert and have good knowledge to tackle the matters are very rare. In addition, time, as well as required equipment to protect hacking, is also very.

According to the survey, "Perceptions about Network Security," 90 percent of the 583 companies polled said they've suffered a network security breach at the hands of hackers at least once in the past year.

As value customers of the Anthem, Inc. we believe it is important to keep each one of you informed of any incident that might affect your business with us. Your privacy and security is our priority for the reason Anthem, Inc. would like to inform our customers of a recent phishing attack. Unfortunately, we have experienced similar attacks in the past which led many of the employees and customers’ data exposed to hackers. Even though this is a serious matter for the company and the customers it is important for us to make our customers aware that phishing attacks are common and they cause huge losses to both the customers and the companies (Wright et al., 2014). Our most recent attack took place on April 2014 and it affected about 80 million identifiable data stolen via phishing emails. The

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.

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

Each year there are many attempts to illegal gain entry into networks by attackers to steal information. Some attacks are designed to steal information while other may be to attack a system to cause damage or disrupt services. Attack can happen from anywhere in the world due to the internet and networks. A person from China can hack into an American network or such Stuxnet virus attack on Iran nuclear power plan which thought to be from Israel or United States but it is unsure where the virus originated from. According to Merkow & Breithaupt (2006), viruses caused the greatest financial loss over other computer crimes, (p 142). Worm is a type of virus which replicates and can easily infect a machine and then spread out across the network by using transport features of the computer or network.

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.

It is the responsibility of the management to hold secure the data and information that they hold on behalf of the clients that they host. This attack was particularly worrying since the corporation is entrusted with highly sensitive government data and the wealth of the American government military information which it should protect from intrusion from external sources. There are also valuable projects for the organization that it protects like

Less than three months after the announcement on December 14, 2016, Yahoo again announced that they had evidence of another breach of their data system (Trautman & Ormerod, 2017). This time the breach of an additional 1 billion users of an estimated 3 billion, had their account data accessed during 2013 (Trautman & Ormerod, 2017). Less than a year after these announcements, the parent company of Yahoo announced an update to the data breach. They disclosed that after a lengthy investigation, apparently every Yahoo account stood breached in the 2013 attack (Philion & Samberg, 2017). At the time, Yahoo had over 3 billion user accounts stored in their data centers with possible compromised data (Trautman & Ormerod, 2017).

In 2014, one the country’s largest home improvement companies Home Depot was attacked by hackers. The hackers used a vendor’s stolen log-on credentials to penetrate through the company’s network and installed a custom built malware that stole credit card data and email addresses. The attack allowed the hackers to gain access to 56 million credit and debit cards in the US and Canada, and another 53 million e-mail address were also stolen.

Network breaches pose a serious threat to all companies especially to those who are primarily engaged in managing finances of their customers. This vulnerable industry includes accounting firms, small and big alike. In fact, the biggest security breach in 2014 reported by Target Corporation (an American retailing company operating in Minnesota and the second largest discount retailer next to Walmart) includes 40 million credit and debit card number of customers which were stolen during the holiday season [1]. This proves that hackers are majorly concerned with obtaining the financial information of clients in order to acquire money. Thus, accounting firms are indeed susceptible to network security breaches which is the reason why a well-tested

It is important to note that whether an attack is perpetrated by a hacker group, other corporations or individuals, organizations must always prepare adequately through intrusion detection and prevention systems in place. Data breaches can have very devastating business and social impact to large businesses and their customers – the users. For instance, were Cloudflare attacked by a competing company, their trade secrets could have given the opponents ammunition to take them out of the field. In addition, lost data could influence criminal activity if for instance particular client information, for

Almost all kind of large and small organizations might face increasing number of attacks into their network or intellectual property. This may lead to data disclosure, data destruction, and damage of organization’s reputation. There are numerous threats in the cyber space which might be capable of stealing, destroying or making use of out sensitive data for financial and non-financial gains. As the amount of computer, mobile and internet users increases, so does the number of exploiters.