Target Data Breach : Overview

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

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

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.

Another stakeholder within the Target Corporation is its shareholders. They, too, have been affected by the security breach, in that the press coverage

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 Security breach that hit Target in 2014 was one of the worst ever. It exposed names, addresses, phone numbers, credit and debit cards information’s of 70 million customers. Target informed that all transactions and customers’ information between Nov.27 to Dec. 15 2014 were stolen on the attack by hackers. This attack affect millions and the giant store as well losing money when their sales declined to 2.5 percent. Target had to email all affected customers and help all of them with their own credit monitoring by offering free credit monitoring and identity theft protection and also make them no liable to any fraudulent purchase after the breach. It was a big deal and it was all over the news. Two suggestions I would give is one, add a protocol

The Target Corporation was exploited in December 2013 and then again in 2015. These breaches included customer’s personal identifying information and retailer’s data. This credit card data breach is a prime example of weak security and infrastructure. This breach happened over the course of one of the United States’ major holiday seasons, Christmas. The security issue involved hackers accessing Target’s customer 's credit and debit cards by the machines that were being used to swipe the cards. These hackers accessed Target’s network with a stolen username and password from a company that was providing refrigeration and HVAC services. This company could access Target’s network `remotely to monitor energy consumption and temperatures. With that, the hackers uploaded malware software on the Target’s credit card machines. The customer data hack happened across the nation, and it was performed in stores and not an online breach of Target customer information.

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.

One of the largest issues with this data breach is, just six months prior, Target had installed “a $1.6 million malware detection tool made by the computer security firm FireEye (FEYE), whose customers also include the CIA and the Pentagon” (Riley, Elgin, Lawrence, & Matlack, 2014). The problem was not the software, it was a lack of reaction by Target’s security team located in Minneapolis. Once the credit card and personal information was stored, the hackers moved the information to various locations throughout the U.S. before sending the data to their computers in Russia. On December 12, 2013, Federal investigators notified Target of a massive data breach; and on December 15, 2013, Target confirmed and eradicated the malware, after all of the credit card and personal information had been stolen.

This section primarily attempts to provide a better understanding as to how the 2013 data breach impacted Target’s finances. Because the breach occurred within Target’s fourth quarter 2013 period—between November 2, 2013, and February 1, 2014—financial analysis was gathered primarily from information provided in Target’s 2013 quarterly reports, 2012 and 2013 annual reports. 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 assesses the company’s profitability through ratio analysis. The third segment gauges Target’s 2013 fiscal year performance with that of its biggest competitor, Walmart. The fourth and final segment looks at whether or not Target was able to regain its customers in the years that followed.

Target Corporation was notified by the Secret Service that they had been the victim of a cybercrime about two weeks before Christmas of 2014. During the investigation, it was discovered that on November 12, 2013 hackers were able to breach their networks through a third party remote access system. Because there was no network segmentation of the Target network, the doors were left open for third party access to the rest of its internal networks. This was in violation of the Payment Card Industry 's Data Security Standard (PCI-DSS) policy stating the isolation of cardholder data from the rest of the companies network (Lemos, 2014).

The following day they deployed their card stealing malware onto the POS systems. On December 11 the attackers are first discovered and on the 15th of December they were removed from the network. December 19th Target acknowledge the breach to the public and details started coming to light on the sophistication of the attack (Jarvis & Milletary, 2014).

Target has not disclosed much detail around the breach due to liability and legal issues but some information is available due to a leaked internal corporate report. The report included information by Verizon which was hired by Target to probe its networks for weaknesses days after the breach was

According to Krebs (2014), “credentials were stolen in an email malware attack at Fazio that began at least two months before thieves started stealing card data from thousands of Target cash registers. Investigators who examined the malware quickly noticed that it was designed to move data stolen from Target’s (then malware-infected) cash registers to a central collection point on Target’s network, a Windows domain called ”\\TTCOPSCLI3ACS\”.

Today, we live in a technologically based world in which almost everything we do is done through computer-based technology. Communication, marketing, and even transactions are all done through technology. The danger of having all of your information online is that once something is on the internet, it is permanent. Whether it be your home address, phone number, or simply pictures of you and your family, you can never really remove anything. This can be both positive and negative. Negative because if your information slips into the wrong hands you can get into trouble. And this can be positive because with all kinds of people around the world posting information on the internet, it brings everyone a little closer together, making it easier to connect with people from all over the globe. One negative effect of the internet making the world a smaller place was Target’s data breach a few years back. In mid-December of 2013, Target experienced a crisis when criminals had forced their way into Target’s system, gaining access to many guests credit and debit card information. As the investigation continued, it was later determined that certain guest information, such as names, mailing addresses, email addresses and phone numbers were taken as well. Target has built its reputation of customer satisfaction over the years by providing excellent service to customers and having better discounts than their competitors,