Equifax Data Breach Analysis

In the middle of the holiday season, Target shoppers were knocked off their feet with the news that in December 2013 that 40 million Target credit card numbers had been stolen (Krebs, 2013f) by someone accessing Target’s data on their point of sale (POS) systems (Krebs, 2014b). To make matters worst Target later revised their number to include the private data for 70 million of their customers (Target, 2014). The breach took place period of November 27 through December 15th 2013 (Clark, 2014). Target had gotten taken for over 11 GB of their data that had been stolen (Poulin, 2014). Target did not catch their internal alerts and was informed about the breach when they were contacted by the Department of Justice (Riley, Elgin,

Aside from the Playstation Outage, there had been larger and more nefarious data breaches in history that exploited weaknesses in internet, server, and network security. One such breach is when Heartland Payment Systems had, what was called, the most massive credit card security breach in history, with hackers embedding deep into Heartland security and recording card data. According to Bloomberg Business, it was estimated that “as many as 100 million cards issued by more than 650 financial services companies may have been compromised”. The attack cost Heartland $12.6 million, which was orchestrated by a man named Albert Gonzalez, who was also the cause for several other data breaches, each costing from thousands to millions of dollars. Another such attack was when Russian, and a Ukrainian, computer hackers assaulted NASDAQ stock exchange servers and stealing “more than 160 million credit and debit card numbers, target more than 800,000 bank accounts” (NY Daily News). Separate hacking operation spanned over seven years, attacking NASDAQ, but also affected “chains like 7-Eleven”. All the operations, in the period of time and the global scale it spanned, resulted “in at least $300 million in losses to companies and individuals”. One of the latest, and possibly the largest, data breaches of 2015, Anthem, the second largest health insurer in the US was hacked, compromising millions of account and personal data, as well as social security. When Anthem discovered that they had been

The Equifax Hack affected millions of Americans. Recently, an email was sent to me stating how my account was one of the millions.

A recent increase in large scale data breaches has exposed a multitude of cybersecurity vulnerabilities that pose a definite risk to consumers (Lorio, 2017). In some cases, a data breach can distress an establishment so much that other organizations experience a backlash from the repercussions (Kosseff, 2011). The Equifax data breach of 2017 is a perfect example of this kind of event as it caused an overwhelming economic repercussion that affected other major corporations and more than 143 million credit card customers worldwide (Janakiraman, Lin, & Rishika, 2018).

Equifax, one of the 3 credit reporting agencies in the US, announced they had a security breach between May and August of 2017, potentially compromised Personal Identifiable Information may include Social Security numbers, birth dates, addresses and, in some instances, driver’s license numbers of 143 million Americans and 100,000 Canadians.

A major example of this situation is the Minneapolis-based retailer Target, which generated a vast amount of media coverage around the holidays in 2013, because of its data breach. Even though it has been nearly two years since the breach was announced, Target is still feeling the effects. Credit card companies and the banks that issue the credit cards were negatively impacted by the breach. Both parties endured high costs as a result of the need to reissue

The company mostly counts on computer systems to manage the account, process visitor transactions, review and examine outcomes. A minor damage or interruption from communications failures, computer viruses and mischievous attacks, security breaches and disastrous events could adversely affect operations. In Q1, revenue fallen down by 2.3%, in Q2, by 1.3%, whereas in Q3 from 0.4% for the year 2014 due to the data breach. Due to lesser promotional activity compared to the highly promotional activity in 2014 after the Data Breach, a satisfactory category sales mix and lower price cutting, there is Rise in gross margin rate from 29.5% last year to 30.4 percent this year. Assertions and investigations may effect on the business and results of operations. If company experience additional data breaches or fail to detect on time, the company could be

In December 2013 we have noticed the target Data breach which resulted in affecting the 40 million credit and debit cards, which was thought one of the biggest data breach .Because of this breach 70 million accounts have been compromised leaking the security information of the people like phone numbers and address . But this year we have noticed the Home Depot breach which is much greater than the target breach ,which compromised 56 million cards.

The data breach was the biggest such attack in the United States federal government and the people exposed in the breach included employees at the Defense Department, current and former federal employees, government contractors, applicants who underwent background checks and security clearance, their friends and families.

In late 2013, news headlines and social media outlets were reeling with the news that Target encountered a cyber-attack that breached the credit card accounts of millions of customers who shopped within the brick and mortar stores during the holiday shopping season. Hackers not only gained access to credit cards numbers, but also other personal data such as email addresses and names (Kinicki & Williams, 2016, p.38). The Target case study explores the dilemma that Target CEO Gregg Steinhafel faced with how to rebound from the very damaging breach. Against the advance of top advisors to Mr. Steinhafel opted for full disclosure to the public. Though a very risky choice, Mr. Steinhafel made a very appropriate decision from a business perspective,

Right now, 37% of Internet users in the US are surfing the web with outdated versions of Java (CSIS, 2015). For organizations that have not paid close attention to cybersecurity in the past, now is your wakeup call. According to a recently released study, the average cost of a data breach in the United States has climbed from $5.9 million to a staggering $6.5 million per breach (Ponemon, 2015). This is enough to not only hurt many organizations, but also cause irrevocable damage to their economic standings. The purpose of this paper is to examine what the root cause for most of these breaches are. From a review of the largest breaches in the past 5 years, I have come down to this conclusion: Unpatched software is single handedly costing American organizations billions of dollars every year in expensive and embarrassing security breaches.

That critical narrative was likely unavoidable even as we still don't know exactly how the breach occurred, so it's hard to assess just how sophisticated the attack against Equifax was but the reality is that, in today's threat environment, no business should consider itself immune from being

Computer security breaches have been occurred in too many places since information technology is used. Security practitioners declare that those breaches incident cost vast businesses that is estimated more than $1 billion, according to Pinsent Masons, (2014). There are also non-financial costs that companies may suffer. Figure 1 is illustrated World's Biggest Data Breaches that happened last decade.

This critique deliberates whether law firms have enough training and expertise to handle client data breaches. The essay asserts that although there is no concrete way to prevent data breaches, law firms need to take reasonable care in mitigating risk that may allow data breaches. This article offers an eight-step plan for law firms to lessen threats to client data. The discussion also recognizes that client data breaches are not limited to stationary desktop computers and laptops. In reality, client data breaches also occur through mobile devices. Therefore, law firms should also exercise reasonable care in safeguarding mobile devices as well as establishing a policy informing employees of steps to take if a mobile device is lost or stolen.

Due the advancement of technology over the past few decades, cybersecurity has become a more prevalent issue for businesses than ever before. Prior to Thanksgiving in 2013, Target experienced the biggest cybersecurity breach in retail history. Target had all the correct controls put in place to prevent the cybersecurity attack. In fact, six months before the attack “[Target] 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” (Bloomberg, How Target Blew It). Target’s security ignored all the alerts that went off regarding the cybersecurity attack, and “stood by as 40 million credit card numbers—and 70 million addresses, phone numbers, and other pieces of personal information—gushed out of its mainframes” (Bloomberg, How Target Blew It). The Target incident is just one example (of many) that demonstrates the need for heightened cybersecurity in the business world. Today, there are various disclosure requirements under multiple financial reporting jurisdictions regarding the impact and cost of cybersecurity breaches. These requirements and disclosures will be discussed in more detail below under the different reporting jurisdictions, including: U.S. GAAP, IFRS, the SEC, and SOX.