Australian Catholic University: ISYS326 - Symantec Data Breach Report

This report provides a comprehensive analysis of the Symantec data breach, examining the details of the incident, its causes, and the vulnerabilities exploited. The report delves into the specifics of how the breach occurred, including the targeting of a demo lab and the lack of sufficient security measures. It assesses the impacts of the breach on Symantec and its clients, emphasizing the exposure of client lists and passwords. Furthermore, the report discusses critical security controls that could have prevented or mitigated the breach, such as encryption, intrusion detection, and vulnerability assessments. The importance of up-to-date systems is also highlighted. The conclusion underscores the significance of proactive data breach mitigation strategies and recommends the implementation of robust encryption mechanisms to safeguard data, particularly within demo environments. The report references key literature in the field to support its analysis and recommendations.

Running head: INFORMATION SYSTEM SECURITY
Information System Security
Name of the Student
Name of the University
Author Note

Symantec breach revealed client list, passwords: report
Abstract:
The main aim of this report is providing an
important overview of the data breaches.
This report has described what the data
breach actually is and it affects
organization. For a deeper analysis of the
data breach, the data breach case of
Symantec has been discussed and analysed
in this report. Critical security controls for
fighting against this type of data breach
cases has been also discussed.
Keywords – Symantec, Data Breach
I. Introduction
The information system is actually
some socio technical, formal and a typical
type of organizational design which is
mainly designed for collation, storing,
process and distributing of the
information. From the perspective of a
social technical there are mainly four
components of an information system.
In the aspects of information
security, information security breach is one
of the important issues of current
generation (Sen and Borle 2015). There
are several of information security breach
cases and it just keep increasing. Proper
measure should be followed for tackling
this type cases.
In this report the data breach case
of Symantec which happen recently will be
discussed. This data breach happened in
the last June month due to which a big list
of Symantec’s clients and password has
been leaked due to which those clients od
Symantec came into the danger.
II. Details of the Breach Causes
In this case, there are several of
aspects which are associated with this data
breach issue. There are some important
critical factors which lead to this data
breach issue. As per the statement of
Symantec the data breach occurred in this
context as the attack was performed on a

demo lab which was not connected to the
corporate network of the Symantec
(Novinson and Novinson 2019). As per the
Symantec it is quite impossible for the
hackers to breach the data which is
connected with the corporate network of
them.
Though Symantec is one of the
largest cyber security organization in
world, they were completely unaware
about the breach which was going to be
performed. This showed the major
problem of the security in the demo lab of
them. In this aspect Symantec does not
identified any of the security problems in
their demo lab before the breach
(Novinson and Novinson 2019). This
showed Symantec that their demo labs are
not safe anymore. Thus, it is very much
important for the Symantec to properly fix
this data breach issue in the demo labs so
that they can avoid any type of data breach
cases in the future.
For the data breach which
happened in the Symantec there are no
security measure solely. As per the
Symantec this data breach occurred as the
targeted system was a demo lab which is
used for the testing purposes (Novinson
and Novinson 2019). Due to this, the data
breach case of Symantec was not very
much important to them so, no security
measures for particularly this data breach
is taken by Symantec. Although, as per the
statement of Symantec this data issue of
the deo lab can be resolved easily if this is
integrated within their corporate network.
According to the statement of
Symantec their security measures are quite
capable, up-to-data and sufficient for
protecting against this type of security
breach and attack cases. They have giver
their statement that this attack become
possible as the hackers targeted one of
their demo labs which is used for the
testing purposes (Novinson and Novinson
2019). If the attack was performed on the
corporate sector of Symantec then the
hackers would have been never successful

due to the up-to-date and sufficient defend
mechanism of them.
III. Critical Security Controls
Though for the Symantec data
breach occurred in the demo lab it can be
painful for them in several of cases. Thus,
it is very much important of each and
every organization that they implement
proper security controls so that type of
security breach cases can be resisted
effectively. Important security controls are
described in the following section.
1) Encryption: Encryption is one of
the effective ways for protection of
the raw data. With having a good
encryption policy almost every
organizational date can be
protected with a higher degree of
security (Barker and Mouha 2017).
Thus, it is very much important to
implement proper encryption
methods for the data protection.
2) Intrusion Detection: The
Symantec faced the data breach
issue in their demo lab as there was
no proper system for the intrusion
detection. An effective system for
intrusion detection can easily
determine any type of suspicious
activity within the network
(Buczak and Guven 2015). Thus,
spotting the hacker will be become
very much easy in this case.
3) Vulnerability Assessment: The
vulnerability assessment is one of
the key security controls to be safe
from the data breaches. By an
effective vulnerability assessment
loopholes in the system can be
identified easily before the hacker
so that those loopholes can be fixed
easily (Lee et al. 2017). Thus, it is
very much important to run a
vulnerability assessment on a
regular basis so that any type of
loopholes in the system can be
identified easily and can be fixed.
4) Up-to-date Systems: The system
vendors assess various type of risk

and pushes updates to the system in
a periodic manner to make the
system more secure. In many of the
cases this critical updates are
missed due to negligence and the
system becomes vulnerable against
the data breach cases. Thus, it is
very much important to keep the
system always updated for
avoiding any type of security
issues.
In this case for Symantec
encryption mechanism is chosen as an
appropriate security mechanism as the
main issue with Symantec is in their demo
lab. If they are able to protect all the data
in their demo lab it will be enough for
them to avoid any type of security breach
incidents as encryption can protect any
type of data effectively (Gai et al. 2016).
Thus, implementing a proper encryption
mechanism has been recommended here
for solving the data breach case in
Symantec.
IV. Conclusion
From the above discussion it can be
concluded that data breach is one of the
critical issues that almost every
organizations are facing. Thus, it is very
much important to mitigate these data
breach cases. For the deep analysis of this
type of data breach cases in this report the
data breach case of Symantec has been
analysed and discussed. In the first section
of this report important details of this
Symantec data breach case has been
presented here. Following part of this
report has discussed about critical security
controls that can be taken against this type
of data beach cases. For the Symantec
appropriate security control which can be
implemented has been determined which is
the data encryption mechanism.

References
Barker, E. and Mouha, N.,
2017. Recommendation for the triple data
encryption algorithm (TDEA) block
cipher (No. NIST Special Publication (SP)
800-67 Rev. 2 (Draft)). National Institute
of Standards and Technology.
Buczak, A.L. and Guven, E., 2015. A
survey of data mining and machine
learning methods for cyber security
intrusion detection. IEEE Communications
Surveys & Tutorials, 18(2), pp.1153-1176.
Gai, K., Qiu, M., Zhao, H. and Xiong, J.,
2016, June. Privacy-aware adaptive data
encryption strategy of big data in cloud
computing. In 2016 IEEE 3rd
International Conference on Cyber
Security and Cloud Computing
(CSCloud) (pp. 273-278). IEEE.
Lee, S., Yoon, C., Lee, C., Shin, S.,
Yegneswaran, V. and Porras, P.A., 2017,
February. DELTA: A Security Assessment
Framework for Software-Defined
Networks. In NDSS.
Novinson, M. and Novinson, M.,
2019. Symantec breach revealed client
list, passwords: report. [online] CRN
Australia. Available at:
https://www.crn.com.au/news/symantec-
breach-revealed-client-list-passwords-
report-526694
Sen, R. and Borle, S., 2015. Estimating the
contextual risk of data breach: An
empirical approach. Journal of
Management Information Systems, 32(2),
pp.314-341.