The Functions of RSA SecurID Tokens and the Impacts of their Breach

Michael’s Store, Inc. is an arts & crafts Retail chain. It has more than 1040 stores located in 49 US states & Canada. The company also owns and operates the Aaron brother’s retail chain, which happens to have an additional 115 stores across the Country. Michael’s store Inc. had a Security breach, which took place between May 8, 2013 and January 27, 2014. About 2.6 million cards or about 7 percent of payment cards used at its stores during the period were affected. Alarmingly, its subsidiary Aaron brothers also had been breached between June 26, 2013 and February 27, 2014. It was reported that Aaron brothers had 400,000 cards impacted. The duration of the treacherous attack in total was 8 months (Schwartz, 2014). In this report, security breach of Michael’s store Inc. is analyzed. The topics covered are how the breach occurred, what did the authorities do to educate the customers & how in future such attacks can be avoided.

It is almost impossible to find the top reasons why most security breaches happen on a secure network compromising hundreds to thousands of users’ personal information. This happens today more often than one would like to think and the consequences are astronomical for users, employees and customers of the companies. To protect a network and thoroughly secure confidential information, one has to examine the top vulnerabilities and think outside of the normal box to protect the network. When a security breach happens, there is usually a pretty simple reason why it has happened. This paper will discuss one of the highly publicized security breaches to happen in years, the Sony PlayStation Network & Qriocity music and video service that

In mid March 2011, spear phishing attack exploited an Adobe Flash vulnerability that was not patched at the time, and is considered as one of the worst attacks in 21st century. The RSA immediately reported that information stolen is related to SecurID two factor authentication products. The company has faced criticism of its approach and maintained secrecy by keeping attackers in the dark as much as possible. Later, in a conference call with analysts, RSA revealed that small groups of RSA employees were targeted through e-mail phishing displaying the title “Job Recruitment 2011” that landed in email-junk folder. The document is an excel sheet, resulting hackers to gain control of machines and access servers in RSA’s network. The excel sheet contained a zero-day installed through Adobe Flash vulnerability. Some hints were left when the thefts of RSA’s database mapping token serial numbers to the secret token seeds that were injected to make each one unique.

PKI supports the distribution and identification of public encryption keys, enabling users and computers to both securely exchange data over networks and verifies the identity of the other party. It enhances the security of data by

RSA is a division of EMC Corporation that offers security products to businesses and government agencies. RSA’s flagship product is SecurID, a combination of two-factor authentication tokens (hardware and software) and the associated server software used in their implementation. This product aims to deliver secure remote access, including access to critical infrastructure. In 2009, it was estimated RSA had “about 40 million tokens and 250 million mobile software versions deployed in over 25,000 organizations”, including banks, government, manufacturing, and pharmaceutical companies (Rashid, 2011). In this paper we will examine the 2011 breach of RSA involving the SecurID product, the incident response and recovery, mitigation strategies,

Cyber-attacks are not unknown however attacks on critical infrastructure are increasing tremen-dously and impact of these are devastating if the systems attacked are Industrial Controlled Sys-tems (ICS). ICS comprises of industries such as oil, gas, water, electricity. An outage of these will result in the enormous loss not only financially but can endanger human life and destroy critical equipment, restoring which can be time-consuming and extremely tedious. Many organizations still rely on antiquated security systems making them vulnerable to the deadly attacks and it is high time to change. This research paper highlights the severity of critical infrastructure attacks and will focus on the strategies to mitigate the risk of these attacks by using techniques like Application whitelisting, patch management, holistic approach for ICS security and moving beyond software security and focusing on Hardware Enabled Trusted Crypto. It focusses on the management of critical infrastructure risks.

In January 27, 2015, it was revealed that a security breach had occurred at Anthem, Inc (Ragan, 2015). The breach has been in position since December with hackers gaining access to massive amounts of user and customer data. What kinds of mistakes did Anthem make? How bad were they? Could they have had better protections in place? Would deeper cryptography have helped with the security and safety of the data that Anthem kept? These are the questions we need to answer.

Our everyday lives are consumed with things on the internet or with the internet. We rely heavily on the internet to the point where we are fundamentally depend on the internet. With that being said this brings a lot of cybersecurity issues. Cybersecurity issues will challenge any and everyone. Cybersecurity will affect business, governments and also the individual. Business firms and governments will face threats that a few years ago were only thought of as science fiction. To battle against these threats cybersecurity was formed and with the formation of cybersecurity, it has become an industry.

Public key infrastructures (PKIs) are necessary to help ascertain the identity of different people, devices, and services. In a nutshell, PKIs go way beyond the use of user IDs and passwords, employing cryptographic technologies such as digital signatures and digital certificates to create unique credentials that can be validated beyond reasonable doubt and on a mass scale ("What is pki?" n.d., p. 1).

We are living in the world where we are required to yield our personal data information to authority or companies such as names, date of birth, social security number or even credit numbers (Magalhaes, 2012). We may be aware that the personal data can expose to unauthorized people if our data is not secure properly, either via wire or wireless network. Lost or stolen data has been seen while data is transferred between different users using both networks. Can we trust companies to keep our data safe from being lost or misuse? Yes, we can. With new cyber-crime laws are enforced, it is in the company's best interest to keep their customers' data more secure (Magalhaes, 2012). This article will summarize the major security risks and threats to

There are many security organizations and associations all around the world that strive to make the cyber world and the physical world a safer place. Each of these organizations and associations offer their own solutions for security threats. These organizations and associations are helpful in preventing many different types of security breaches and are necessary for the continual protection of both business and people as they continue to develop more advanced technology. Without these organizations and associations, security would be a very disconcerting topic for many individuals.

As global security continues to grow exponentially in response to threats of cyber terrorism, the field of computer security continues to proliferate into many adjacent socioeconomic and technologically-based areas of society. Gartner Group, a leading market research in the enterprise IT industry, has stated that the worldwide market for security software will reach $21B in 2011, rising to $15.8B in 2015 (Karjalainen, Siponen, 2011). This rapid growth of computer security is also driving the development of entirely new patents in the areas of cryptography, enterprise security management strategies, and extensive support for more advanced programming features for securing enterprise networks (Albrechtsen, 2007). The pace of development in this market is accelerating as the sophistication and variety of threats continues to also exponentially escalate (Liang, Xue, 2010).

As a staple of communication and research at Edu Corp, computer-based networks play a critical role in the day-to-day operations of the company. With the ongoing concern regarding network security, Edu Corp has established a comprehensive, detailed policy in order to protect our digital assets, but most importantly, our employees and customers. Since 2014, nearly thirty major companies have been victims of cyber-based attacks, resulting in millions of dollars in losses (Walters, 2015). At Edu Corp, we strive to implement cutting-edge, proactive security solutions to our various networks.

As we talk about security breaches, let’s look into what protects businesses from getting hacked. Network security is to help protected information, to create the possibilities that various information is not being breached or hacked by other users. The network security is to be concerned about employee information, visitors and customer information, as well as vouchers and data. The consequences of security being breached can be significant in

According to identitytheft.info, almost 15 million Americans have their identity used fraudulently due to information leaks and information insecurities. With the growing dependency on computer systems to store confidential information across the world, it is only necessary that that the information be protected by strong security systems which include both hardware and software so that both the businesses and the consumers feel safe in the transportation of information over the inter-webs. Contemporary Information security systems use many different components involving both hardware and software