Chase Bank Hacking

What do Premara Blue Cross, Anthem, Chick-fil-A, Sony, USPS, MCX, Staples, Kmart, Dairy Queen, SuperValue, Jimmie John's, Viator, Home Depot, PF Chang's, Community Health Systems, and JP Morgan all have in common? Each of these companies were hacked during 2014-2015. Sadly, this is just a short list showing the breadth of industries and size of operations that are vulnerable. According to Time Magazine in March, 2015, "You're not just imagining it: Lately, a new data breach has been reported almost every week."

To start off with I chose to go with our banking or financial industry. The banking industry is constantly getting attacked by various methods on a daily basis. I chose this industry because I happen to know someone who works in the security sector at Wells Fargo Bank, he was a good person to get information on what he sees on a daily or weekly basis. This paper is the opinion of myself and with gathered information from various resources.

Hackers can gain access to the computer records of banks, credit card companies, hospitals, merchants, universities, government agencies, and other organizations. Though such breaches occur much more rarely than phishing, even one instance can give the hacker access to millions of people’s personal data, including Social Security numbers, birth certificates, driver’s license numbers, health records, employment records, and financial information. The FBI reports that, since

During the last Christmas season, Target announced that their data security was breached. According to David Lazarus in Los Angeles Times, Target stated that roughly 110 million customers’ information was illegally taken from their database. The information included their credit/debit card info, phone numbers, and email addresses. Target is one of the most popular grocery stores in the U.S.; they have a substantial amount of consumers. Because of this incident, consumers' trusts for the store have been decreasing. Worrying about losing its customers, the company offered a free year of credit monitoring and identity-theft protection, so the customers will feel more secure. Not only Target, some other large retailers also faced the same issues. They want their customers to trust that the companies can protect private data. However, should we not worry? Data breaches have been going on for about a decade, but we have not seriously thought about the issue. In order to protect people’s privacy, the federal government should make new laws concerning companies’ handling of customer information.

In 2008, Bank of America purchased Countrywide Financial, a mortgage lender based in California. Shortly after this acquisition, information came out that employee Rene Rebollo had slowly been downloading information about clients onto thumb drives and selling them to other mortgage companies’ employees. Information stolen included customer files, many with social security numbers and other personal forms of identification (Reckard 2011). Millions of customers were compromised in this breach, and the costs for Bank of America and Rebollo were high.

The Target data breach remains one of the most notable breaches in history, it was the first time a CEO of a major corporation was fired due to a security event. The breach received an enormous amount of attention, it caused corporations and individuals to change the way they think about information security and data protection. Between Thanksgiving and Christmas 2013 hackers gained access to 40 million customer credit cards and personal data of 70 million Target customers. The intruders slipped in by using stolen credentials and from there gained access to vulnerable servers on Targets network to launch their attack and steal sensitive customer data from the POS cash registers. All this occurred without a response from Targets security operations center, even though security systems notified them of suspicious activity. The data was then sold on the black market for an estimated $53 million dollars. However, the cost to Target, creditors, and banks exceeded half of a billion dollars. This report will review how the infiltration occurred, what allowed the breach to occur including Targets response, and finally who was impacted by the security event.

Equifax is one of the three most important credit card reporting agencies that provide information on a person’s credit report. Recently, a small group of criminal and unethical hackers hacked into Equifax. The hack exposed the criminals to millions of social security numbers, birthdates, names and much more. The agency is supposed to be highly secured and trustworthy for most. This incident has put the identity of millions in critical conditions. By describing the threat, protecting against it by using browser and tools, and having good judgment there are several ways to handle a hack like this.

In 2013, A US retailer Target got hacked in their payment system. Credit card information, addresses and names of 100 millions of people were leaked (Adee, 2015). Curiously, a few months later, one of my credit cards, used in Target recently before the hacking, had many abnormal purchase on physical and online store transactions. I can solve the problem and remove unpurchased value on credit card account, but it costs me many days. I had to fill out some form, I called many times to the bank for the claim, I listened some wonderful music while I was waiting for a representative to attend to me, and get the same message, “all of our current representatives are busy right now, wait for the next available representative or call back later…”, over

In September of 2016, it was revealed that there was alleged misconduct at one of the largest and safest banking institutions in the United States. Wells Fargo Bank was ranked among the nation’s safest financial institutions according to an analysis done by Global Financial, (Inside Tucson Business, 2009). Alleging that between May 2011 and July 2015, there were more than 2 million bank accounts or credit cards opened for customers without their knowledge or permission (Blake, 2016). Clients started complaining the they were receiving debit/credit cards from the bank that they had not ordered. Wells Fargo employees also started complaining that about the unethical behaviors they witnessed or were asked to participate in to the Human Resource Departments, the bank’s internal ethics hotline, branch’s individual managers and supervisors. All which led to the discovery of the fraud scandal.

Bank of America is a multinational banking institute and one of the most trusted in the banking industry. This organizations sole purpose is to protect the customer’s confidentiality and assets by ensuring that data protection is the number one priority; however any organization when holding personal information can be a victim of data breach and BoA is not exempt. One of the largest risks BoA faces today is Mobile Banking. This consumer convenience is used by fifty percent of smart phone owners (Finney, 2014). Phishing is also threat to the banking industry; this strategy by hackers allows the extraction of consumer passwords and other sensitive information. Hackers targeting banking institution employees with convincing e-mails that fool them into clicking on malicious links-which ultimately compromise their credentials or

In the past 12 months, there have been nearly 432 million accounts hacked belonging to many websites and applications. Many of this information stolen was sensitive, personal data such as credit card information, phone numbers, passwords, and even addresses.

On Dec 19, 2013 Target Corporation announced to the world that they had suffered a major data security breach. Due to Target Corporations poor stance on network security, hackers were able to steal over 40 million payment card records, encrypted PINs and 70 million customer records during the Black Friday sales week. Initial reports indicated that it was malware placed on their Point of Sales (POS) system, but that was just the tip of the iceberg of the breach. If there had been better security from the start this breach could have been avoided or greatly reduced.

"Hackers", on the other hand probably view the system more abstractly, as a resource waiting to be used at the end of a telephone line, a challenge beckoning them, calling to them irresistibly, whispering to them, "There will be no damage done and no one will be the wiser."

In the early days of computing, a hacker was primarily referred to as a computer guru, someone who is extremely technical with a high expertise in computer also known as “Expert Programmers”. Nevertheless, as technology is advancing at a face pace, hacking has adopted a completely different definition. The modern definition is someone who access a computer system primarily to steal or destroy information. Hacking has caused major harm in the realm of technology. Over the years, hackers have become much more lethal in their craft. They manage to break into complex information systems from entities such as banks, government agencies, and private businesses. Furthermore, they often manipulate their victims through social engineering in order to obtain financial benefits. Hackers hold different label such as: black hat hacker and white hat hacker in which all have their own motives.

When firms like Home Depot and Target invests a lot of financial and non-financial resources to curb the menace, one is left to wonder why such vices continues to affect them and their clients. Hacking of companies in the United States have reached a sky high and notable names in the industry have been affected by the vice. The firms like Home Depot, JPMorgan, Michael, Nieman Marcus and Target, have had its share of this vice. The United States Postal Services have not been left behind also, because it was also affected by the hackers ( 'Cybercrime a