Verizon Data Breach Investigations Report

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

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.

I obtained the data for this report by scouring the internet for stories and data that backed up my claim that the fraud is committed mostly between individuals and conducted a survey at a large retail store that asked the following questions:

In Herbert B. Dixon Jr.’s “Is Hacking the New Normal?”, the author is trying to convince the world to pay better attention to the technology in their lives. Dixon is addressing why he believes that the new “normal” is to live in a society where all technology is hacked and vulnerable all the time. Dixon creates the implied message that everything is a target, and should be handled as if it is a primary target of hacker’s attention and time, because it just might be. Dixon’s ideas are backed by statistics given by Peter Katel in his article “Identity Theft”, regarding the number of people that are attacked and how hard the economy is hit by the breach in security. Thus, showing just how many are attacked and giving validity to Dixon’s ideas about sources of information breaches. This source brings to light other sources of potential security breaches, and gives a new perspective regarding just “accepting” this new era. Dixon gives valid ideas on how to increase your safety but ultimately describes that nothing is completely safe.

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.

Liginlal, D., Sim, I., & Khansa, L. (2009). How significant is human error as a cause of privacy breaches? An empirical study and a framework for error management. computers & security, 28(3), 215-228.

A data breach is a security event in which tricky, guaranteed or private data is copied, transmitted, saw, stolen or used by an individual unapproved to do so. Data breaches may incorporate cash related information, for instance, Visa or bank details, Personal Health information (PHI), Personally identifiable information (PII), This may consolidate events, for instance, theft or loss of automated media, for instance, machine tapes, hard drives, or Pcs such media whereupon such information is secured decoded, posting such information on the web or on a machine by and large accessible from the Internet without honest to goodness information security protections, trade of such information to a skeleton which is not completely open however is not legitimately or formally authorized for security at the authorization level, for instance, decoded email, or trade of such information to the information systems of a maybe adversarial association, for instance, a battling undertaking or a remote nation, where it may be introduced to more focused unscrambling techniques. While Targeted attacks keep on raise, Intriguing development in these assaults. As initially reported in a year ago 's Internet Security Threat Report, aggressors included watering-hole assaults to their arms stockpile. Anyway reports of the passing of lance phishing

In the Data breach Investigation report of 2012, the compromised records 174 million security incidents from all over the world were analyzed also the investigation confirmed 855 data breaches. The attacks were carried out from 19 different nations and affected all kinds of organizations small and large.

The analysis of 2,260 breaches and more than 100,000 incidents at 67 organizations in 82 countries shows that organizations are still failing to address basic issues and well-known attack methods. The (DBIR, 2016) shows, for example, that nearly two-thirds of confirmed data breaches involved using weak, default or stolen passwords. Also shows that most attacks exploit known vulnerabilities that organizations have never patched, despite patches being available for months – or even years – with the top 10 known vulnerabilities accounting for 85% of successful exploit “Organizations should be investing in training to help employees know what they should and shouldn’t be doing, and

Skimming, Cash Larceny, Check Tampering, Billing Schemes, Payroll schemes, and overstatement of inventory are all forms of fraud. There are a vast amount of fraud types out in the world today that some of us may not have even realized yet. With the immense amount of fraud that is occurring, how could so many people get away with committing it? The answer is there is too much fraud occurring for anyone to look into the smaller fraudulent acts. There are specifically two types of frauds that occur that focus a lot on the business aspect, Corporate and small business fraud. Small business fraud tends to appear more often than corporate fraud but that still doesn’t hide the issue of corporate fraud being a big part of the fraud domain. Corporate fraud is a little less complex compared to small business fraud.

The potential of violations can come from numerous sources (Lawrence & Weber, 2011) (Consumer Information). Recently Equifax had a data breach of their customer’s personal information. The hackers accessed the names, social security numbers, birthdates, and addresses of 142 million American consumers (Consumer Information). This is frightening and happens more often that we think. According to PricewaterhouseCoopers executive, ”Cybercrime has emerged as a formidable threat. Over the years millions have fallen victim to theses attacks. In a survey of 583 U.S. companies, 90 percent said that hackers breached their company’s computers over the last twelve months (Lawrence & Weber, 2011). Cyber crimes occur when hackers attempt to damage or destroy a computer network or system of company’s data. Criminals will use one of the most harmful systems around. This system is called a zombie. A zombie is

Individuals across the world continue to commit computer crimes every day. Although, they are much different than violent crimes, computer crimes can still be very dangerous. There are many individuals that possess the skill to access other individual’s devices, containing their personal information, photos and financial information. One main issue with this type of crime is having the ability to

Malicious insiders have many ways to remove data from any organizational system. With the positive sides of internet; we also have to face the negative impacts of it. The malicious insiders can transfer the data through the use of emails or storage services. As a result, the organizations have to face challenges and take correct measures to protect their confidentiality. Microsoft’s Google Docs and SkyDrive need to be protected too as they allow to upload files without considering whether encrypted or not(Silowash, Lewellen, Burns, & Costa, 2011).

Computer crime is referred to, in many cases, as an insider job, as the majority of such acts are performed by employees, taking into account that the fact that they have access to data makes it easier for them to perform crimes. Many employers express little interest in who in their companies has access to data and to restrictions being placed on computers within the company. Instead, they are inclined to focus on designing systems that would mainly prevent outsiders who want to hack into their databases. It is intriguing to think about how most computer crimes are committed by trusted employees rather than by hackers.

Their operations are very slick and swift such that stolen data is quickly exploited within seconds of being submitted by unsuspecting victims. Since 2005, over 400,000 databases have been compromised since 2005, and thousands more have gone unnoticed or reported. About 40 percent of those involved in IT security have no fixed figure on the number of hackings their companies have experienced. One of the rapidly increasing areas of ecommerce is in the use of web-based applications to replace traditional over-the counter transactions. Hackers have expectedly, latched on. According to a study by Gartner, over 75 percent of Internet security breaches are due to flaws and loop holes in software. The reason for this is that, applications are normally designed and put together quickly to get the system running, and no time is spend analyzing and assessing security implications. As computer hackers continue to step up their operations in line with technology advancements, the securities and future industry recorded a 150 percent increase in the number of suspicious activities detected by their systems. During the same time, research carried out at the University of Maryland indicated that a computer connected to the Internet was subject to an attempted hack every 40 seconds. The battle between ecommerce websites and consumers wages on, according to an independent analyst, ‘consumers are losing a tug of war.’ Simon Smelt, an economist who runs a survey company