Cyber Security : Target Corporation

In 2013, target corporation experienced a serious data breach where its security, as well as the payment system,was breached. The security breach was so intense in which case; it compromised over 40 million credit as well as debit card numbers. Furthermore, 70 million phone numbers, addresses, and other personal information was affected(Krebs, 2014).The attack was made without the knowledge of Target Corp. until mid-December when the department of defense notified the company that its system was being attacked. One problem that came out clear, in this case, was the fact that Target Corp. had been notified of the attack

The Target Corporation has undergone many changes due to the 2013 security breach where hackers stole personal information from credit and debit cards of at least 70 million customers. Target sales and reputation has dropped from this instance, thus eliciting changes in their security systems, changes in management, and a few policy changes in handling customer information. With the public eye on the corporation’s handling of the situation, Target has been communicating these changes through various means. The changes they needed to communicate were informing customers of the security breach, addressing the bad press coverage to shareholders, downsizing of employees, and

The Home Depot and Target have been one of the many retail establishments cyber attack breaches that have being targeted by cyber attackers. The Home Depot was the target of a cyberattack payment card system breach where their credit card information was basically stolen on September of 2014. The attacked occurred by attackers gaining third party credentials in order to gain access to the system, after they gained access to the system they weakened the system gaining their own access privileges. After doing all the mentioned above, malware was installed quickly on Home Depot’s self-check-out system. All these steps where taking by the cyber attackers resulting in the loss of more than fifty million credit card accounts and email addresses.

A direct cyberattack in 2014 to JPMorgan Chase caused a compromised of accounts effecting a total of 76 million households and seven million small businesses. We are clearly, in times when consumer confidence in the digital operations of corporate America is on shaky ground. In directly, banking is taking the brunt of the fallout but major stores also have breaches which of course are directly related to their financial data. Store like, Target, Home Depot and a number of other retailers have experienced major data breaches. 40 million cardholders and 70 million others were compromised at Target alone in 2013 and an attack at Home Depot in September, 2013 affected 56 million cardholders.

Even though Target is ranked currently 36 in the fortune 500 companies and have over 1750 stores, they are still very susceptible to being a victim of a cyber attack. In 2013 Target fell victim to a security breach on their system. Roughly around Thanksgiving of 2013 someone had installed malware in Target’s security and payment system enabling the hackers to steal credit card and personal information. “Six months earlier the company began installing a $1.6 million malware detection tool made by the computer security firm FireEye, whose customers also include the CIA and the Pentagon.” (BloombergBusiness) In place was a very effective security system, but when the attacked happen on November 30, FireEye spotted the hackers and Bangalore, a third party cyber security company hired by Target alerted the IT team at corporate office in Minneapolis. There was no response from Target’s Corporate IT team and therefore led to the 40 million credit card numbers and 70 million addresses, phone numbers

Target Corporation enhance its information warehouses with latest big data that is technologically sophisticated to crunch large data using complex algorithms and provide vital output data for a daily operation as well as strengthen its capabilities over its rival which is a competitive advantage and speed up worker productivity. A quality tracking tool provided by information system tracks each package, parts ensuring the goods meet the quality standard.

Lastly, one of the major ethical dilemmas faced by Target corporation was the Target's Credit Card security breach. In the mid of december 2013 Target’s security breach was hacked and consumer information such as credit card number,names, mailing addresses, phone numbers or email addresses were taken. Over 70 million consumers were affected and about 40 million credit and debit card consumers accounts have been impacted. However how innovative and well ranked and honored, Target Corporation is, it failed to address this dilemma in an effective timely matter. First, Target security team missed the earlier alerts and warning signs of such events.

Once Target released the breach to the public, sales dropped. The company attempted to attract skeptical customers to shop by offering a 10 percent discount on purchases in its stores the weekend before Christmas, but the damage to customer loyalty appeared in the latest sales figures. Target reportedly spent a significant amount of money on security technology (Capacio, 2014). Although systems used encryption, the encryption was presented ineffective because the data was entered in memory where it was unencrypted. For encryption to be effective, the company must hire a defense in depth strategy in which they can also defend the key and protect access to systems where the data needs to be unencrypted in order to be processed (Ferguson, Schneieir,

Once on Target’s network with elevated privileges the attackers were able to launch malware to the POS systems that would capture the credit card information of the consumers as they swiped their cards to pay for their items. They launched a second piece of malware that that would take the captured information and move it to a dump server on the internal network. Once the information was on the dump server it them

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

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.

Even though Target is ranked currently 36 in the fortune 500 companies and have over 1750 stores, they are still very susceptible to being a victim of a cyber attack. In 2013, Target fell victim to a security breach on their system. Roughly around Thanksgiving of 2013, someone had installed malware in Target’s security and payment system enabling the hackers to steal credit card and personal information. “Six months earlier the company began installing a $1.6 million malware detection tool made by the computer security firm FireEye, whose customers also include the CIA and the Pentagon.” (BloombergBusiness) In place was a very effective security system. However, when the attacked happen on November 30, FireEye spotted the hackers and Bangalore (a third party cyber security company hired by Target) that alerted the IT team at corporate office in Minneapolis. There was no response from Target’s Corporate IT team and therefore led to 40 million credit card numbers and 70 million addresses, phone numbers and other personal

Months before the assault there were numerous notices, both from inside the organization and additionally outside, demonstrating new sorts of malware focusing on installment terminals. It might have been avoidable, had the notices been paid attention to. At the season of the notice, Target was refreshing the installment terminals in planning for the Christmas season, making them more powerless against assault. Maybe appropriate interests in information security could have kept the assault. 6) Why might management not treat cyberthreats as a top priority?

Target allegedly paid a great deal of money on security technology (Capacio, 2014). Although systems used encryption, the encryption was incompetent because the data was retrieved in memory where it was unencrypted. Though some level of

Why was Target mentioned? This breach shows that even a retail giant is vulnerable to invasion (Wallace, 2015). Due to the fact that the ABC Inc. company has already been compromised once, it is vital to fix the original vulnerabilities and ensure that this does not happen again. In order to do this, the attack methodologies must be studied and several solutions will be suggested. The solutions will be considered in terms of overall feasibility and cost to the company.