Target Cyber Breach: Importance of Cyber Defences and Government Requirements

Running head: TARGET CYBER BREACH
TARGET CYBER BREACH
Name of Student
Name of University
Author’s Note

TARGET CYBER BREACH1
Introduction
Data breach can be described as a specific security incident where data can be
accessed without any sort of authorization. Data breaches usually aim in harming various
businesses as well as consumers in numerous ways. Breaches are usually costly which has the
ability to damage reputations as well as lives and hence consume much time to repair. Data
breaches are very frequent these days (Manworren, Letwat & Daily, 2016). With the progress
of technology, more data moves to the digital world, this results in making cyber-attacks very
costly along with being common. Globally, the overall average cost for a company that has
been affected by data breach includes $3.86 million, as per a particular study carried out by
the Ponemon Institute (Shu, Tian & Ciambrone, 2017). This represents the fact that around
$148 on average for every record that is stolen, online crime is actual threat to anyone who
exists in internet.
Discussion
Organization that had a cyber-breach
Target’s data breach had taken place in the year of 2013, not every details regarding
attack had been made public but numerus researchers as well as experts had developed an
attack timeline that had exposed various critical junctures during the attack and hence
highlight numerous points where it could have been prevented (Cheng, Liu & Yao, 2017).
The attack had been started in the month of 27th November, 2013. The professional who was
in the post of target personnel had found out regarding the breach and hence informed the
U.S. Justice Department within the month of 13th December. The security blogger had posted
regarding the entire story (Janakiraman, Lim & Rishika, 2018). This particular attack had
targeted numerous debit as well as credit records of the customers. Various sources had
reported that the breach had appeared to have just started on as well as around Friday of

TARGET CYBER BREACH2
2013. The target personnel had informed regarding the fact that the customers who were
shopping at one of the stores of the organization during the attack had to compromise with
their card details. This had occurred with around 110 million of customers (Weiss & Miller,
2015). The attacker had been successful in backing their way in the corporate network of the
target with the help of compromising a particular third-party vendor. The overall number of
vendors that had been targeted was not exactly known however they took control over only
one (Greene & Stavins, 2017). A phishing emails was duped a certain Fazio employee, this
had allowed Citadel to be installed on the computers belonging to Fazio. The attackers had
waited till they got the perfect opportunity to attack, login credentials of Fazio Mechanical.
Importance of cyber defences
Cyber defences had been very important due to numerous reasons, these reasons are
as follows
The rise in the cost of breaches: this is important because cyberattacks had been very
expensive for any sort of business. Statistics that have been calculated with the help for
various researches, had reported that the average cost of a particular data breach at a huge
firm could be around 20, 000 Euros (Solove & Citron, 2017). Besides financial damage, the
cost incurred in the remediation process is huge as well. Along with inflicting untold
reputational changes.
Increasing the rate of sophisticated hackers: nowadays, every website has their own
website along with having exposed systems which can provide numerous attackers with
numerous entry points into the internal networks (Gray & Ladig, 2015). With the help of
attacks that are highly sophisticated, the commonplace business requires to assume the fact
that they would be breached at some time and hence implement various controls which can
help them against the attack.