Data Breach at Red Cross Blood Service: A Comprehensive Report

This report provides an analysis of the data breach suffered by the Australian Red Cross Blood Service, where the personal information of over 550,000 donors was compromised. The breach occurred due to human error, specifically the placement of a file containing donor registration information on an insecure development website maintained by a third party. The report details the causes, including vulnerabilities in third-party security practices and lack of proper security measures. The consequences include the potential exposure of sensitive donor information, including health status, leading to donor concerns about data safety and potential damage to the Red Cross's reputation. The report concludes with a discussion of the importance of implementing robust security protocols, granting access to data only to authorized personnel, and establishing stringent security measures before data is taken online to prevent future breaches.

Data breach
Red Cross service suffers data breach

Introduction
 Data breach refers to a situation whereby unauthorized person
or institution accesses protected sensitive and confidential data
(Aldossary and Allen, 2016: p.490).
 Some of the causes of data breach include physical attacks,
poor configurations malware, application vulnerabilities and
too many permissions.
 The effects of data breach include lack of confidence from the
customer, use of the information in a wrong way and damage
of the system.

The scenario
 The Australian Red Cross Blood Service is
accusing the Dubious honor as the source of
data breach in their system.
 The data from more than 550,000 donors
have fall on the wrong hands.
 The third party accessed the data on the
website due to human error.

The cause of the data breach
 The Dubious honor company depends on
third party to develop and maintain their
site.
 However, the company did not put in place
security measures on the website.
 At the time of uploading the details of the
blood donors, the hackers took advantage
of the loophole and accessed the data.

The consequence of the data breach
 All the blood donor details including their
health status have been erased (Cheng, Liu
and Yao, 2017: p.34).
 The companies are blaming each other.
 There are emergence of other security
issue, for instance, the online forms are not
able to connect to the database.

Continuation
 The donors doubt whether their credentials
are safe.
 It may be difficult for other people to give
their details to the Red Cross Society in
future because they fear their details are
not in safe hands.
 The system may face other challenges
because the hackers are now controlling it.

Conclusion
 Even though the investigations are underway
to identify the source of the production, there
is already destruction.
 It is important to provide security measures
before taking the data online.
 However, the company should grant access to
few people because many people may have
bad motive of stealing the data for personal
benefit.

References
• Aldossary, S. and Allen, W., 2016. Data security,
privacy, availability and integrity in cloud
computing: issues and current
solutions. International Journal of Advanced
Computer Science and Applications, 7(4), pp.485-
498.
• Cheng, L., Liu, F. and Yao, D.D., 2017. Enterprise
data breach: causes, challenges, prevention, and
future directions. Wiley Interdisciplinary Reviews:
Data Mining and Knowledge Discovery, 7(5).