Question

Describe one cybersecurity attack that has occurred in the past 6 months, and based on your understanding of this week’s readings, explain what vulnerabilities within the organization may have contributed to the breach.

Answer 1

Case Study:Capital one breach

On July 19, 2019, company determined that an outside individual gained unauthorized access and obtained certain types of personal information about Capital One credit card customers and individuals who had applied for our credit card products.

Impact:

Based on the analysis to date, this event affected approximately 100 million individuals in the United States and approximately 6 million in Canada.

Importantly, no credit card account numbers or log-in credentials were compromised and less than one percent of Social Security numbers were compromised. In addition, the outside individual who took the data was captured by the FBI. The government has stated they believe the data has been recovered and that there is no evidence the data was used for fraud or shared by this individual.

The largest category of information accessed was information on consumers and small businesses as of the time they applied for one of our credit card products from 2005 through early 2019. This information included personal information Capital One routinely collects at the time it receives credit card applications, including names, addresses, zip codes/postal codes, phone numbers, email addresses, dates of birth, and self-reported income.

Beyond the credit card application data, the individual obtained portions of credit card customer data, including:

• Customer status data, e.g., credit scores, credit limits, balances, payment history, contact information.
• Fragments of transaction data from a total of 23 days during 2016, 2017 and 2018.

This information has been shared on Capital One’s website, servicing portal, press release and 8K filing.

The individual also obtained the following data:

• About 140,000 Social Security numbers of our credit card customers.
• About 80,000 linked bank account numbers of our secured credit card customers.

Company have notified these customers through the mail.

For the Canadian credit card customers, approximately 1 million Social Insurance Numbers were compromised in this incident. We have notified all Canadian customers affected.

Vulnerabilities that lead to breach:

1.Poor configuration of the firewall which is used to protect the system from intrusions, cybersecurity.

2.This type of attack could have been prevented by proper diligence and “penetration testing,” which tests the strength of the firewall. The company did not have strong internal control system to protect it.

3.Improper security software systems in place. Various security software systems also can provide IT departments with alerts about mistakes such as this.

4. Improper security on cloud.