Nowadays, information security is one vital part of a company to develop and maintain its information system. As technology became more advanced in terms of creating and utilizing, the more threats a company’s information system will face. A threat is a person or organization that seeks to obtain or change data illegally, without the owner’s permission and knowledge. Similarly, a vulnerability is an opportunity for threats to gain access to individual or organizational assets (Kroenke 309). Apparently, a threat will lead to a company’s vulnerability gradually, Target Corporation is one specific example in this case. The data breach at Target Corporation which exposed more than 110 million of its customers’ credit card and personal data appears to be related to a malware-laced email with phishing through cyber-attack. With the breach of data, a company might lose massive amount of money in order to cover the incident. In other words, creating a strong information security is said to be one of the most important and challenging task every company is looking forward to keep its business intact.
The type of attack encountered by Target Corp. is most likely malware infection. Malware infection is the most popular threat of attack that has been experienced by the respondents. It took up to 67.1% of all cases of cyber-attacks in the past ten years (Kroenke 315).The breach at Target Corp. occurred sometime before Thanksgivings 2013 when a group of European hackers installed malware in Target’s security and payment system to “steal every credit card used at the company’s 1,797 U.S. stores (Riley, Elgin, Lawrence, and Matlack). For weeks, the invasion of malware went undetected because it escaped all the antivirus protections Target had (H...
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...’ purchases on the weekend before Christmas 2013 (Wahba, Phil, and Finkle).
In order to reduce the likelihood of exposing this cyber risk, companies and individuals should have technical safeguards involve hardware and software. Those technical safeguards include identification and authorization, encryption, firewalls, malware protection, and application design (Kroenke 319). One should start to protect his/her security system by a few blocking and tackling. When an antivirus program asks to install the latest updates, one should allow them to do so. The reason is that the program might figure out what its problem is and trying to fix that. Besides constantly checking the security system, individuals should also limit the access to those suspicious emails. Those emails could contain malwares and malicious program that could break through into one’s security system.
Email security services will include blocking ransomware and emerging threats with the highest effectiveness and accuracy, stopping new and sophisticated threats such as ransomware, spear phishing, and business email compromise. Spear phishing will be prevented by having a comprehensive defense that includes multiple layers of protection, strong isolation , deep visibility and dynamic security awareness. Attacks will be contained and responses will be orchestrated across endpoint security and web gateways by remediating attacks and blacklisting threats. Dynamically classify impostor email and other threats that don't involve malware. Sender-recipient relationship, domain reputation, email headers, envelope attributes and email content will be analyzed. Custom rules will be integrated allowing group and user level controls to meet the needs of the client. Quarantines will enable the customer to separate email
Security helps the organization meet its business objectives or mission by protecting its physical and financial resources, reputation, legal position, employees, and other tangible and intangible assets through the selection and application of appropriate safeguards. Businesses should establish roles and responsibilities of all personnel and staff members. However, a Chief Information Officer should be appointed to direct an organization’s day to day management of information assets. Supporting roles are performed by the service providers and include systems operations, whose personnel design and operate the computer systems. Each team member must be held accountable in ensuring all of the rules and policies are being followed, as well as, understanding their roles, responsibilities and functions. Organizations information processing systems are vulnerable to many threats that can inflict various types of damage that can result in significant losses (Harris, 2014). Losses can come from actions from trusted employees that defraud the system, outside hackers, or from careless data entry. The major threat to information protection is error and omissions that data entry personnel, users, system operators and programmers make. To better protect business information resources, organizations should conduct a risk analysis to see what
Nowadays, hacking systems which get the data from payment card in retail stores is a popular issue. The use of stolen third-party vendor credentials and RAM scraping malwares were the main reasons for the data breach. A brief introduction of when and how the Home Depot’s data breach took place and how the home depot reacted to the issue and rectified it by
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 would not expect to see and happen to any major retailer/corporation.
As electronic commerce, online business-to-business operations, and global connectivity have become vital components of a successful business strategy, enterprises have adopted security processes and practices to protect information assets. But if you look at today's computing environments, system security is a horrible game of numbers: there are currently over 9,223 publicly released vulnerabilities covering known security holes in a massive range of applications from popular Operating Systems through to obscure and relatively unknown web applications. [01] Over 300 new vulnerabilities are being discovered and released each month. Most companies work diligently to maintain an efficient, effective security policy, implementing the latest products and services to prevent fraud, vandalism, sabotage, and denial of service attacks. But the fact is you have to patch every hole of your system, but an attacker need find only one to get into your environment. Whilst many organisations subscribe to major vendor's security alerts, these are just the tip of the security iceberg and even these are often ignored. For example, the patch for the Code Red worm was available some weeks before the worm was released. [02]
The ability to conduct warfare through technological methods has increased information security awareness and the need to protect an entities infrastructure. Subsequently, cyber warfare produces increased risk to security practitioners that employ technology and other methods to mitigate risks to information and the various systems that hold or transmit data. A significant risk to information lies in the conduct of electronic commerce, hereinafter called e-commerce. E-commerce is the purchasing or selling of goods and/or services through the internet or other electronic means (Liu, Chen, Huang, & Yang, 2013). In this article, the researcher will discuss cyber warfare risks, present an evaluation on established security measures, identify potential victims of identity theft, and present an examina...
Cybercrimes are on the rise now. People information are constantly getting hacked. Target computers were recently hacked and over a thousand people credit card information was stolen. Every day we
Kharpal, A 2013, Cyber-crime is ‘greatest threat’ to companies survival: EY, CNBC, accessed 12 November 2013, http://www.cnbc.com/id/101155856
Every day millions in some cases billions of dollars are made by businesses from income brought in by online sale of products and services. As businesses continually develop and expand their client base with online products and services so does the desire by criminals to exploit vulnerabilities in their e-commerce setup. The mass worldwide internet usage growth within the last 20 years has been “an approximate 16 million users in 1995 to an estimated 2,937 million in March of 2014” As the importance of e-commerce increases so does the need to protect the technological infrastructure that will carry out online transactions for each business regardless of its size. I will attempt to highlight and review the history of a few cyber crimes to show the progression of the crimes within the last 30-40 years. I also plan to review how the economy and consumers are impacted by cyber crimes. Finally I will make an effort to contribute with information gathering on how to lower the risk of a cyber attack from and individual user to a large scale business.
Malicious code is a real danger to modern systems. Most systems nowadays do not work in isolation; they are more likely to be connected to other systems and sometimes they can even be dependent on them. Therefore an attack on one of the systems in the network is a potential attacking attempt to any other systems, with which it is interacting. Therefore, it is inevitable for any networked or Internet-connected computers to deal with malicious code attacks at some point. Businesses lose billions of dollars each year because of malicious code attacks. Responding to the attack and restoring all the data on the computers is a time-consuming and expensive task. It is a much better practice to try preventing it through organizing and maintaining effective defenses. However, it is important to keep in mind that there is no one general solution that can help to prevent all the attacks. Attackers are constantly looking for new ways to take advantage of systems’ vulnerabilities and find new ones. That’s why organizations have to not only defend themselves against existing attack methods, but also try to predict and prevent new attacking techniques. It means that computer and network security is a never-ending challenge and expense.
One example of bad hackers is what happened worldwide to Target companies. Target was hacked and millions of people’s credit card information was stolen (Riley, 2014). Many people think that the ones that hacked target hacked it because target gave away information, in reality they were as victim as the ones who’s information was stolen (Riley, 2014). Someone installed malware in Target's security and payme...
...ntial information from a user. Luckily, there are reliable ways of defending against them. The most reliable way is to install strong security software that has the capacity to defend against the multifaceted forms of threats. Avoiding P2P file sharing sites and scanning email attachments before downloading them are also a surefire way of protecting a computer against malware threats. Basic acts like using an updated browser and allowing Windows updates to install and update themselves are also necessary to keep a machine safe. Furthermore, checking validity of individual website addresses and installing authenticated software can also help a computer user remain safe from potential data theft and possible damage of useful programs. It may also pay good dividends to backup files. In case of a lethal malware attack, backed-up files can always be recovered easily.
In most instances, victims are not aware or do not know the perpetrator of the crimes. In some instances, this may include the perpetration of crime and actually committing the crime. With the advancement in technology, there seems to be a new way to commit cyber crime each day and a great number of unsuspecting individuals eventually becomes victims. There are various types of cybercrimes that can be committed with the common ones being Computer Viruses and identity theft which can have damaging effects on individuals and businesses (Search security, 2008). Some of these crimes such as the computer viruses have crushed main servers of companies and thus crippling these kinds of companies since some of them lose important data and information which they have stored electronically. Everyone who makes use of the computer seems to be at risk of becoming a victim to cyber crime if not on the lookout. As a matter of fact most perpetrators of such crimes are not caught since technology seems to be too advanced and the various crimes seems to be taking place rapidly making it almost impossible to catch the perpetrators of the crime. The home users are the most likely group to be targeted since they are less likely to have any security measures in place. A major way to deal with cyber crime at an individual level is to install antivirus software’s, firewalls and make use of intrusion detection system (Web Root, 2015).
Cybercrime refers to all forms of crime conducted through a computer or a mobile device using computer networks. It is thus the use of a computer with the aim of intercepting and manipulating content, disrupting communication, stealing or generally destroying others’ information or hardware through a network. Although cybercrime is a worldwide problem and affects both small and big companies, small companies are affected more from the dangers of cybercrime. The rapid advancement in technology is causing tremendous problems to businesses in terms of more sophisticated cyber-attacks. This project is interesting and beneficial because it enlightens one on the dangers of cybercrime, thus preparing individuals to know how to prevent attacks while online, how to reduce the effects of a cyber-attack and how to prevent future
...ng to many individuals who have suffered from hacking, phishing, scams, identity theft, fraud etc. Computer crime describes a very broad category of offenses, which include anything that requires an electronic device or the Internet. Cybercrime is now a global issue and it has a major impact on every individual or business that interacts with technology and the World Wide Web. When important information is stolen, not only are individuals at risk of becoming part of greater crimes but it can also affect an entire country when its national secrets are stolen. In the end I may conclude that computer crime is a dangerous crime that all individuals should be aware of due to the many devastating results it can cause. Cybercrime cannot be stopped due to the high levels it has reached, but immunity can be used to keep safe from it or at least keep individuals less at risk.