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Target Corporation Security Breach

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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.
Problem:
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 …show more content…

The correct measure or solution was to use malware defenses. In this case, vendors should use commercial virus software to check and protect the system as well as employ firewalls and other security measures on the systems used to interact with the vendor (Bejtlich, 2004). By doing that Target would have prevented any unwanted attacks and thus prevent the damages caused by the data breach.
Use of vendor credentials: Furthermore, since the company is using a vendor product, it is appropriate to limit the network access to the vendor portal. By doing that, any unauthorized person who obtains the confidential credentials will not be able to access vendor portal unless they access the portal from the network that has the rights to access the portal. Also, account control and monitoring are necessary to provide multi-factor authentication that gives access to the vendor portal

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