What is data breach?
Data breach can be considered as an incident which involves the unlawful and unauthorized viewing, access or retrieval of sensitive, confidential or protected data. It is a kind of security breach intended to steal and store sensitive data to an unsecured or unauthorized locations. Data breaches may involve personal information such as transactional information, personal health and insurance information, social security information, organization’s operational secrets and IPs.
Data breach can occur at any place, in any environment and by any medium, however the most common breaches occur due to a hacker hacking into a corporate network to steal unauthorized and sensitive information. However, a great deal of breaches occurs within the organization, which includes an employee viewing unauthorized data or someone else accessing others account to gain personal benefits.
Some of the biggest hacks in history:
American Massive Business Hack: This is considered to be one of the largest hacking ever in which hackers stole 160 million credit and debit card numbers and targeted 800,000 (Beekman). This massive attack which happened over eight years ago hit lot of companies including NASDAQ. Some of these companies include 7-eleven, J C Penny, Hannaford, Hartland, Jet Blue, Dow Jones, Euronet, Visa Jordan, Ingenicard etc. Over seven years, five Russian and Ukrainian used sophisticated hacking techniques to compromise millions of credit card numbers and bank details. This isolated and unexpected operation spanned across the world and resulted in at least $300 million dollar in losses to organizations as well as individuals. The cyber attacks occurred between 2005 and 2012, and many of them were carried out in 2008 and...
... middle of paper ...
...cle-1.1408948>.
Acohido, Byron, and Usa Today. "Hackers breach Heartland Payment credit card system." ABC News. ABC News Network, 21 Jan. 2009. Web. 7 Feb. 2014. .
Perez, Sarah . "Target’s Data Breach Gets Worse: 70 Million Customers Had Info Stolen, Including Names, Emails And Phones." TechCrunch. N.p., n.d. Web. 8 Feb. 2014.
Perlroth, Nicole . "LivingSocial Hack Exposes Data for 50 Million Customers."Bits LivingSocial Hack Exposes Data for 50 Million Customers Comments. N.p., n.d. Web. 9 Feb. 2014. .
The Minneapolis based Target Corporation announced in December that criminals forced their way into the company’s computer system. The data breach compromised 40 million credit and debit card accounts of customers who shopped during the holiday season between November 27 and December 15, 2013. The data captured was far broader than originally imagined as hackers gained access to 70 million customer’s personal information including names, home addresses, telephone numbers, and email addresses. Additionally, expiration dates, debit-card PIN numbers, and the embedded code on the magnetic strip of the card were stolen.
The breach started through a contracting company called Fazio Mechanical Services, Inc. (FSM). FSM is a HVAC contractor “connected to Target’s systems to do electronic billing, contract submission, and project management.” (Goche & De Metz, 2014) The start of the data breach madness beg...
The year 2013 was not one marked for pride for the retail chain, Target. They had one of the largest data breaches known to date that occurred between November 27th and December 15th. Not only was this the one of the largest attacks known to date of this kind, it was also quite eye opening to many who may not have paid any attention to the world of information security. The Target hack resulted in 40 million compromised credit and debit card accounts and that was just the initial known result. After some time, the research revealed that a total of as many as 110 million Target customers were the victims of this gigantic hack. Although computer crimes occur within the United States often, the bigger problem is that criminals from other countries across the oceans are attacking as well.
A huge security breach happened at Equifax which exposed sensitive data like Social Security numbers and addresses. The customers don’t even know that their data has been breached. Equifax gets its data from credit card companies, banks, retailers and lenders sometimes without you knowing. The company has found no evidence of unauthorized activity on Equifax's core consumer or commercial credit reporting databases. Equifax has created the website where
Good afternoon members of the media and our target customers. My name is Spencer Beck and with me is Kaylyn Nese, John Bui and Jennifer Tran. We appreciate the chance to be here to discuss important issues surrounding data breeches and cybercrime. To begin with, I want to say how deeply sorry for the impact this intrusion had on our guest. We know this break in security has shaken their confidence in the Target’s brand and we will work endlessly to restore their trust.
About 15 million United States residents have their identities and information used fraudulently each year. Along the use of their identities, they also had a combined financial loss totaling up to almost $50 billion. Major companies such as Apple, Verizon, Target, Sony, and many more have been victims of consumer information hacking. In each of the cases, millions of consumers’ personal information has been breached. In the article “Home Depot 's 56 Million Card Breach Bigger Than Target 's” on September 18, 2014, 56 million cards were breached due to cyber attackers. Before the Home Depot attack, Target had 40 million cards breached. Company’s information is constantly being breached and the consumers’ are the ones who end up having to pay the price. If a company cannot protect the information it takes, then it should not collect the information.
This analysis will explore The Home Depot data breach which occurred on Sept 8th, 2014, one of the nation’s largest security retail compromises of that time. The Home Depot, with over 2,200+ stores in the United States, Canada and Mexico, suffered a historic cyber-attack of significant proportions. The breach was devised by skilled hackers who developed an unknown custom malware that penetrated their payment systems and stole over 56 million credit cards and email addresses from millions of customers. In my research of this case, it was difficult for me to comprehend that the world’s leading home improvement retailer could be so careless given this breach occurred less than a year after the Target data breach in December 2013. This evaluation of The Home Depot will examine the company’s discovery of the breach, their response to customers, improved data security measures, and finally the outcome including present day findings
Hacking is the term used to describe the process of breaking into and obtaining access to a computer system or network. It’s essentially the modern successor of the age-old breaking-and-entering. In this information age, information is power. Those who obtain a person’s personal information can use it to for various crimes including identity theft. Companies and corporations are not exempt from this either. Nowadays, many companies store their customer’s personal data in their databases (a massive collection of data, similar to a giant, virtual phonebook). As a result, they become targets of hackers who, if successful,
It is without a doubt one of the greatest retail security ruptures ever. Weeks after the cyber hack initially occurred, Target at long last recognized the rupture on December 19. The genuine inquiry is the reason this basic issue remained unreported for all nowadays. In the event that announced before, clients could've taken suitable wellbeing measures to keep their data from being abused.
There are many ways to prevent data breaches and the research is still going on how to prevent Data Breaches as we know that technology is always vulnerable. The most important prevention measures to Data Breaches are:
Target had a catastrophic security breach in December that involved 40 million credit cards, CVV numbers, and customer information (Greenberg, 2013A). Several weeks later the number of stolen credit cards rose to 70 million and now personal information was stolen (Greenberg, 2014B). The story is unfolding as the forensics team starts to piece parts together; unfortunately, they found a larger security breach than what was reported. Last week, the number of credit cards increased to an estimated 110 million (Popken, 2014). Forensics takes a long time to analyze and the timeline could be weeks or it could be months to know the exact details of what happened. I know this is supposed to be a fact based report, but not a lot of information has been disclosed to the public except for the quantity of credit cards, the type of information, and the main cause. The main cause is what we want to focus on, so let’s go into the specifics.
The attack on the company represents one of the largest risks to personally sensitive information in recent years, and is the third major cybersecurity threat for the agency since 2015.
Cyberterrorism costs companies, goverments and everday people billions of dollars each year. "Cyberwar may be to the 21st century what blitzkrieg was to the 20th (Arquilla)." In 1994, a Russian hacker broke into CitiBanks funds transfer system and transferred
There are a lot of fears in the world. Some fear dying and public speaking, but several people fear being a victim of identity theft. Identity theft or also known as identity fraud is a cyber-crime in which a person’s social identity or a business identity is compromised or leaked in various ways and result in devastating consequences. These consequences can ultimately destroy the personal identity or business (cited in Carbajo). Around the United States, numerous consumers and business owners are losing substantial amounts of money due to identity theft. There have been several organizations that been targeted such
The threats to security from the United States Department of Defense, the national power grid and the Chamber of Commerce are very real and omnipresent. The Defense Department made an admission of the first major cyber attack upon its systems in August 2010. It was revealed that the attack actually took place in 2008 and was accomplished by placing a malicious code into the flash drive of a U.S. military laptop. “The code spread undetected on both classified and unclassified systems, establishing what amounted to a digital breachhead.” (2) This quote, attributed to then Deputy Defense Secretary William J. Lynn III, is just part of the shocking revelations that were disclosed in his speech made on July 14, 2011.