Five Network Security Breaches
Network breaches are an ever-present and growing threat to network security. There are many ways that such breaches can occur, and the following material will analyze five case studies. The issues to be addressed will include, what went wrong, how could it have been prevented, and what measures could be instituted to prevent a reoccurrence.
Naoki Hiroshima’s Twitter Handle
Naoki Hiroshima was the owner of a rare Twitter handle of just one letter, @N. The handle is rare enough that he had been offered as much as fifty thousand dollars for it (Naoki Hiroshima, 2014). His account was often the target of theft via password reset attempts, so he thought nothing of it when on January 20th 2014, he got a text from PayPal with an account change validation code, but later that day when he checked his email, Naoki saw an email with a confirmation from GoDaddy stating that his account settings were successfully changed. When he called GoDaddy, he discovered that he no longer owned his registered domain, and they would not speak to him about it because he could not verify ownership information – it had already been changed.
Naoki’s email was linked to his domain, so the hacker had control of his email and websites. Naoki quickly changed the email for his Twitter account, which prevented its theft, but his websites were used by the hacker as a bargaining tool to trade for the @N username. After the hacker got the Twitter account, which was the actual target, he detailed how he had social engineered a PayPal phone operator to give him the last four digits of the account card number. The hacker then called GoDaddy, and told them that he lost his card, but he remembered the last four digits of it. The representat...
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For example credit card transactions and security breaches have occurred which have cost the company million of dollars. Target Corporation must do a better job of securing its data to prevent future loss in profit, sales, and stock values.
After the breach, many Target customers refused to shop at their stores due to losing trust in the company. Target’s security breach was not an isolated incident; numerous other companies have faced similar security breaches such as Home Depot, Neiman Marcus, Sony, and this could even happen on your own personal home computer. As a Target cardholder and loyal customer for many years, I believe the company took appropriate actions to notify customers of the breach. Target informed me by email and sent a letter reassuring my information was not compromised. As a valued Target cardholder, I was given the opportunity to apply for the free credit-monitoring program, which I took full advantage of. As an additional measure, Target provided customers with a new online safety feature to monitor suspicious activity by allowing customers to set alerts through email or text when purchases exceeded a specified amount. Consequently, Target is tightening security and making every effort to gain back trust to retain
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The security breach involved most of the Target stores in the U.S. Along with the card numbers, debit card pins, buyer’s names, and personal information were stolen as well. Some customers filed a lawsuit against Target for “failing to protect customer data.” (Demarche, 2013. p.1). Later, Target CEO Steinhafel stated, “I know that it is frustrating for our guests to learn that this information was taken, and we are truly sorry they are having to endure this.” After Steinhafel issued his apology he doubled the amount of employees to take phone calls from customers, as well as give a ten percent discount to those who shopped on the 28th and 29th of December.
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.
I chose the article about the Target Data Breach because I was actually one of the people affected. I wanted to learn about how to handle the situation and what to do in case more information was compromised. I wanted to know more information about how something like this can happen and affect so many people. It is also a major issue being discussed in the news and in finance so I wanted to learn more about how Target and the banks will handle this issue. This article is about how 40 million credit and debit card accounts were stolen. It explains the difference between experiencing credit card fraud and only getting your account information stolen. Most of the people that had their information stolen were not affected by credit card fraud. An explanation of this is that fraudulent transactions may be rejected by a retailer’s anti-fraud system and the consumer might not even be aware of any activity taking place because it is being stopped before the fraud can even take place. Also, since such a large number of people were affected by the scandal, most banks have taken control and cancelled and replaced the old credit and debit cards to prevent any theft from happening. Many banks are waiting to see if the fraud actually happens before reissuing cards because it is so costly. Although there has not been very much fraud at this point, hackers may be waiting for all of the publicity to die down before they commit their fraudulent acts. The article states that many times hackers may wait a year or two to use account information. When the hackers wait a long period of time, the ...
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On December 19, 2013, Target Corporation released a statement, informing the world that their network has encountered a security breach, and over 40 million customer credit card information was stolen from nearly 2000 Target stores. The breach happens in November 2013 around Black Friday weekend, but Target security team did not discover that there had been a security breach to their system until days later. Initially, Target announced that the hacker had gained access through a third-party vendor, to the customer’s point of sales, from Target’s credit card reader, and manage to collect over 40 million
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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
Without proper protection, any part of any network can be susceptible to attacks or unauthorized activity. Routers, switches, and hosts can all be violated by professional hackers, company competitors. In fact, according to several studies, more than half of all network attacks are waged internally. To determine the best ways to protect against attacks, we should understand the many types of attacks that can be instigated and the damage that these attacks can cause to data. The most common types of attacks include Denial of Service (DoS), password, an...
Since 9/11, there have been 25,000 airport security breaches. And those are the breaches the TSA have learned about and have stopped. There have been thousands of breaches that haven’t been put to a halt, and our airports have taken a hit because of it. Obviously, airports need some more or new security systems. Although there have been many advancements with airport security, it might discourage people from flying due to the new ideas they have to protect the customers.
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