Target 's Data Breach And Aftermath : How Cybertheft Snowballed For The Giant Retailer

In December of 2013, target corporation faced a serious security breach where over 40 million credit cards were stolen from different target stores. This paper is going to explore the problem, the background information about the problem, the controls that could have been in place to prevent the issue, the intended plan of control and the associated risks involved.

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

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.

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’s response to the breach was not appropriate and they did not handle the whole situation with integrity. From not being forthcoming when the breach

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.

Target and its larger grocery-carrying incarnation, SuperTarget, have carved out a niche by offering more upscale, fashion-forward merchandise than rivals Wal-Mart and Kmart (Target, 2014). Target has had its share of problems in the past, one of the most infamous being the credit card breach in late 2013. Target informed the public that at least 40 million of its customer’s debit and credit card information had been hacked. In spite of the security breach Target is well known philanthropic actives.

Jarvis, K., & Milletary, J. (2014, January 24). Inside a targeted point-of-sale data breach. Retrieved from http://krebsonsecurity.com/wp-content/uploads/2014/01/Inside-a-Targeted-Point-of-Sale-Data-Breach.pdf

Recently with Target and General Motors is having to deal with the public opinion of doubt in part due to security risks and quality of product. Target has had a well-publicized security breach where customers sensitive information was made available. This obviously will have a negative effect on consumer confidence. It goes without saying in today’s market place and number of choices a person has to purchase a product to include E-commerce, network security is a must. Online market places advertise the use of third party secure payment with trusted names such as PayPal. With a brick and mortar store front, it is assumed or not even considered to be a risk by some. Target has stayed somewhat silent, it seems they are just

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.

This section primarily attempts to provide a better understanding as to how the data breach impacted the results reported in Target’s financial statements. Because the breach occurred within Target’s fourth quarter 2013 period—between November 2, 2013, and February 1, 2014—financial analysis was gathered from information provided in Target’s 2013 quarterly reports, 2012 and 2013 annual report. This analysis will be divided into four parts. The first is an analysis of the company’s quarterly revenues and net earnings and how it measures year-over-year. The second relates to the costs associated with the data breach. The third assesses the company’s profitability through ratio analysis. The final segments gauge Target’s 2013 fiscal year performance with that of its biggest competitor, Walmart.

The analysis of 2,260 breaches and more than 100,000 incidents at 67 organizations in 82 countries shows that organizations are still failing to address basic issues and well-known attack methods. The (DBIR, 2016) shows, for example, that nearly two-thirds of confirmed data breaches involved using weak, default or stolen passwords. Also shows that most attacks exploit known vulnerabilities that organizations have never patched, despite patches being available for months – or even years – with the top 10 known vulnerabilities accounting for 85% of successful exploit “Organizations should be investing in training to help employees know what they should and shouldn’t be doing, and

Their operations are very slick and swift such that stolen data is quickly exploited within seconds of being submitted by unsuspecting victims. Since 2005, over 400,000 databases have been compromised since 2005, and thousands more have gone unnoticed or reported. About 40 percent of those involved in IT security have no fixed figure on the number of hackings their companies have experienced. One of the rapidly increasing areas of ecommerce is in the use of web-based applications to replace traditional over-the counter transactions. Hackers have expectedly, latched on. According to a study by Gartner, over 75 percent of Internet security breaches are due to flaws and loop holes in software. The reason for this is that, applications are normally designed and put together quickly to get the system running, and no time is spend analyzing and assessing security implications. As computer hackers continue to step up their operations in line with technology advancements, the securities and future industry recorded a 150 percent increase in the number of suspicious activities detected by their systems. During the same time, research carried out at the University of Maryland indicated that a computer connected to the Internet was subject to an attempted hack every 40 seconds. The battle between ecommerce websites and consumers wages on, according to an independent analyst, ‘consumers are losing a tug of war.’ Simon Smelt, an economist who runs a survey company

The breach was carried through what is referred to as a memory scraping software, which once installed in a computer, is able to store sensitive information such as: names and credit card numbers. Although, it is unknown how these hackers were able to install this software into target’s point of sale systems, experts affirm that it could have been installed by anyone who had access to the company’s POS system. What is scary is that this malicious software could have been downloaded by a target employee after innocently clicking on a link from an anonymous email or downloading a free disguised software program from the internet. The software could have also been installed by the thieves themselves through a physical security breach into any of Target’s thousands of stores nationwide or even in its headquarters. To make matters even worse, the breach could have also intentionally come from someone within the IT department in the organization. Whichever the case may be, I guess we will never know. What is important to recognize though, was this giant’s response to deter the breach and its actions in restoring and improving the organization’s IT structure.