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.
With Target handling the security breach as best as they could, investigators and the Department of Justice are trying to figure out how the security breach happened. Upon investigation, it is believed that “the data was obtained via software installed on machines that customers use to swipe magnetic strips on their cards when paying merchandise…”(Reuters, 2013. p.1). Even though investigators provided the theory above, they are still unsure of how the cyber criminals were able to take so many card numbers from almost all the Target stores. The investigators and feds are still looking into how and who stol...
...o city council to vote on whether or not it would be a good idea, but the council voted not to go along with the idea and cancelled the revamping project. They said "the Strip wouldn’t be the same if they got rid of historic stores along 18th street."
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 you know, Target was infiltrated by malware and resulted with a criminal breach of Target’s security and data systems between the dates of November 27th through December 18th 2013.
Our world and its infrastructures have become largely dependent on information technology solutions and computer networks. The criminals or “cybercrooks” behind the malware attacks are looking to retrieve information from users for their gain. This is bad news seeing as it can put many companies and users personal information at risk. There have been many articles created in response to the CryptoLocker virus. A recent article suggests that CryptoLocker has opened doors to many more instances of ransomware. PoS (Point of Sales) attacks is the act of gathering important user data from PoS machines, these are ATMs and credit card readers used in all different types of places. OpenSSL is the most commonly used encryption software used on the Internet, big online companies use this software. Malware evolves through time capitalizing on new approaches and exploiting the flaws in the emerging technologies to avoid detection.
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
Despite investing one of top security system, and spend money to boost up their defense mechanism to meet industry standard, hackers still able to find the holes of the Target system. Target seem to run into a costly mistake in this cases. However, I believe, this mistake could be happened upon anyone, what we learn to prevent it in the future is more important. I believe, as a security standpoint, we have to look at it from multiple angles and not rely on only one defense mechanism. To succeed again the hackers, educating the workforce and assessing the human factors in not only technical but also strategy and risk management must be ensured for companies to guarding against any future attacks.
During the 2013 holiday season, Target was involved in a major credit card hacking scheme which affected millions of consumers. There were approximately 70 million customers that had their debit and credit cards compromised. The company announced that hackers somehow manipulated the payment system and stole debit and credit card data. The hackers were able to retrieve consumer names, card numbers, expiration dates, and the three digit security code on the back of the cards (Kassner, 2014). While the breach may not have given hackers access to customers personal banking and credit card accounts, it created a great risk for identity theft and the possibility for the hackers to use the information and create accounts in the consumer’s name.
5. The thing that you will need to implement is the disabling of all unnecessary ports and services on the POS devices.
Malware was used by hackers to invade the company’s data (Kinicki & Williams. 2016). Target should have had more plans and technology to not only catch this malware was present before the breach they should have also acknowledged the breach as soon as they were for told. If I was advising Target I would suggest that they immediately work to find and utilize tools that could prevent this from happening again.
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...
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
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
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).