Primary Article- Target Data Breach: There Hasn't Been Much Fraud...Yet http://finance.yahoo.com/news/target-data-breach-hasnt-much-190048314.html I chose the article about the Target Data Breach because I was actually one of the people affected. I wanted to learn about how to handle the situation and what to do in case more information was compromised. I wanted to know more information about how something like this can happen and affect so many people. It is also a major issue being discussed in the news and in finance so I wanted to learn more about how Target and the banks will handle this issue. This article is about how 40 million credit and debit card accounts were stolen. It explains the difference between experiencing credit card fraud and only getting your account information stolen. Most of the people that had their information stolen were not affected by credit card fraud. An explanation of this is that fraudulent transactions may be rejected by a retailer’s anti-fraud system and the consumer might not even be aware of any activity taking place because it is being stopped before the fraud can even take place. Also, since such a large number of people were affected by the scandal, most banks have taken control and cancelled and replaced the old credit and debit cards to prevent any theft from happening. Many banks are waiting to see if the fraud actually happens before reissuing cards because it is so costly. Although there has not been very much fraud at this point, hackers may be waiting for all of the publicity to die down before they commit their fraudulent acts. The article states that many times hackers may wait a year or two to use account information. When the hackers wait a long period of time, the ... ... middle of paper ... ...rder to better protect consumers. I learned that in Europe, there is a technology that supports greater cardholder verification, and there has been a great decrease in the number of people affected by financial fraud. I think that advanced technology like this should be more widely used in order to make credit card use more secure. This project definitely strengthened my belief that consumers and banks need to be more cautious when it comes to personal information like credit card numbers, email addresses, phone numbers, birthdays, or addresses. I also believe that the government should respond to this large data breach and have harsher laws, and more protection from fraud and identity theft for people that use credit cards. EMV and other technology should be put into effect in order to better protect consumers and their financial information and the economy.
One year ago, on September 8, 2016 the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau(CFPB), the Los Angeles City Attorney and the Office of the Comptroller of the Currency (OCC) fined Wells Fargo Bank $185 million, alleging that more than 2 million bank accounts or credit cards were opened or applied for without customers' knowledge or permission between May 2011 and July 2015. This essay will discuss the Wells Fargo scandal by explaining how the event happened and describing how the organization approached handling a response to the crisis. This will be seen, firstly by describing the how the scandal happened, and what were the causes, secondly by discussing the reaction of the company in front of the situation, how they dealt with the crisis and then
The Minneapolis based Target Corporation announced in December that criminals forced their way into the company’s computer system. The data breach compromised 40 million credit and debit card accounts of customers who shopped during the holiday season between November 27 and December 15, 2013. The data captured was far broader than originally imagined as hackers gained access to 70 million customer’s personal information including names, home addresses, telephone numbers, and email addresses. Additionally, expiration dates, debit-card PIN numbers, and the embedded code on the magnetic strip of the card were stolen.
Hacking into large companies or agencies to steal one’s card information has become simple. Lewis (2013) says that, “Hacking is incredibly easy; survey data consistently shows that 80 to 90 percent of successful breaches of corporate networks required only the most basic techniques“(p. 1). On November 27, 2013, Target’s security was breeched when forty million credit and debit cards were stolen. The breach lasted from November 27 to December 15, 2013.
At first report, the data breach was discovered to have compromised all Target stores nationwide, and it involved the theft of credit card numbers and customer stored data within the magnetic strips of cards that were used in the stores. It was believed to have occurred right after Thanksgiving Day and in to December (Krebs, 2013). Apparently, online shoppers were believed to be safe from the hack and that only the stores were attacked. Now, the intrusion was believed to have resulted from a visit to one of Target’s stores by an HVAC company named Fazio Mechanical Services from Sharpsburg, PA. Krebs (2014) stated, “Target told reporters at The Wall Street Journal and Reuters that the initial intrusion into its systems was traced back to network credentials that were stolen from a third party vendor” (para. 1).
The data breach at Target may have been less brute force than a casual observer might imagine, given the language used on Target’s own FAQ which describes the incident as “criminals forc[ing] their way into our system.”1 While this description might conjure an image of hackers sitting in a dimly lit room, running complex software on super powered machines, and attempting a brute force or DDoS style attack to gain access to customer information databases, the reality appears to have been slightly less glamorous. There can be a variety of unintended entries to a secure system, and criminals will go for the weakest link in the chain. This weak link may oftentimes be not a security hole in the software, but instead the users of that software. The term hacking is used as a catch-all for situations where an information system has been compromised, even though the actual attack or breach of security was nothing more than information leaking out from users or corporations not thoroughly versed in good security practices. In these cases, the breaches are more appropriately described as being a result of social engineering. Social engineering is the technique of combining technological and psychological savvy to obtain illegal access to information2. This can involve anything from complaining and pleading with a phone support representative to give out information, to just realizing that many people use the same password for most of their accounts. Phishing is a social engineering tactic where an attractive, familiar, or official looking email is sent out to multiple recipients with the intent of tricking them into clicking a malicious link or downloading malware attachments3,4. While the latter approach may feel more like hacking, because ...
At Target, we take our responsibilities to our guest very seriously. This attack has only strengthened our commitment to our guests and their information. We will investigate and learn from this attack so that Target, our industry and more importantly our guest’s well being. I can guarantee that Target’s security system is safer and more secure than ever before.
Target is one of the biggest and leading companies in the retail market. “Target’s customer credit and debit card information of as many as 40 million customers was compromised it was called one of the largest breaches ever of American consumer data.” (Jamieson & Erin, 2013) “The breach captured data stored on the magnetic stripes of the cards that customer’s swipe at the cash register, according to Krebs on Security, a respected data security blog. The breach involved everything from customer names, e-mails as well as mentioned the credit card information including the CVV codes on the back of their cards. The breach occurred during the holiday season of Thanksgiving including Black Friday one of the notorious shopping holidays of the year.” (Jamieson & Erin, 2013)
Information is still coming to light about the Target data breach, as the company is still actively pursuing an investigation. It has been revealed that the hackers involved in the incident began by moving data from the Target networks to Fazio, an HVAC company that Target does business with and sends a lot of digital data to, and out to a number of servers in the U.S. and Brazil. (Mick, 2014) This made it hard to spot the attack initially because a lot data was being sent to Fazio on a regular basis. It also makes the data thieves much harde...
About 15 million United States residents have their identities and information used fraudulently each year. Along the use of their identities, they also had a combined financial loss totaling up to almost $50 billion. Major companies such as Apple, Verizon, Target, Sony, and many more have been victims of consumer information hacking. In each of the cases, millions of consumers’ personal information has been breached. In the article “Home Depot 's 56 Million Card Breach Bigger Than Target 's” on September 18, 2014, 56 million cards were breached due to cyber attackers. Before the Home Depot attack, Target had 40 million cards breached. Company’s information is constantly being breached and the consumers’ are the ones who end up having to pay the price. If a company cannot protect the information it takes, then it should not collect the information.
The rapid growth in technology has been impressive over the past 20 years from television graphics and multi-purpose phones to world-wide connections. Unfortunately, the government is having trouble with this growth to protect the people from having their privacy violated due to the information being stored electronically. In “The Anonymity Experiment”, by Catherine Price, states how easily a person can be track and how personal can be lost. Also, in “Social Security and ID theft”, by Felipe Sorrells, states how social security numbers and personal identities can be stolen and how the government is trying to stop that theft. They both intertwine with technology and privacy though Price's article has a broad overview of that, while Sorrells's focus is mainly on social security number and identity thief part. Price and Sorrells shows that companies are taking too much advantage from the customer, the government, even though their trying, needs to start helping the people protect their privacy, and a balance between the amount of trust people should have giving out their sensitive records to which information is protected.
This issue can really affect people more than you think. Sometimes if you’re a victim of this you may not even get your money back. If you’re lucky you may get your money back, but you would have to wait a long time. As I said above the average amount of money stolen per theft is $4950. This money could easi...
The primary use of stolen identities is for credit card fraud which can occur by an offender placing charges on a victim’s existing cards or by opening new accounts in his or her name. A common activity for these fraudsters is to change the billin...
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 would not expect to see and happen to any major retailer/corporation.
This shows that identity theft is a growing problem that needs to be addressed (VanderPal). The United States Department of Justice, a branch of the United States government, defines identity theft as “terms used to refer to all types of crime in which someone wrongfully obtains and uses another person's personal data in some way that involves fraud or deception, typically for economic gain.” Identitytheft.info, a website edited by Rob Douglas, an identity theft expert, states, “…every individual or business is vulnerable to attack when it comes to personal or corporate information, products and services.” They also state, “As the methods used to perform identity theft expand, so do the types of accounts and services being stolen by identity thieves” (“Identity Theft Statistics”). As shown above, millions of people are being affected by identity theft in the United States, and it is only
Have you ever received a credit card bill at the end of the month with a ridiculous amount of money needed to be paid that you never spent? This is because of identity theft. The FTC estimates that each year, over 9 million people are affected by identity theft. According to Sally Driscoll, this is because almost anyone with a computer and a slight bit of computer knowledge can pull off identity theft. Experts also claim that identity theft is the fastest-growing crime in the world. Identity theft is a global problem that cannot be stopped without effective measures. The problem is, effective measures are very hard to come by when dealing with identity theft because almost any security protocol can be by-passed.