ITC-591 Assessment 1: Timehop Security Breach - Analysis & Mitigation

This report provides an analysis of the Timehop security breach that resulted in the loss of private data for approximately 21 million users. The breach occurred due to exploitation of vulnerabilities in Timehop's cloud computing environment, including underestimation of risks, potential untrustw...Read More

ITC-591
Assessment 1

Table of Contents
Introduction................................................................................................................................3
How it occurred?....................................................................................................................3
Vulnerabilities that were exploited and point of failures.......................................................3
Recommendations for mitigating the risks and failures in future..........................................4
Any more recommendations to mitigate the security breach risk?............................................4
References..................................................................................................................................5

Timehop security breach
Introduction
The company Timehop has undergone through security and data breach in which all the
private data that incorporates name, contact and email address of approx. 21 million clients
have been lost. After the investigation, it is stated that the attacker or hacker has accessed the
cloud computing environment of the Timehop’s first in December through the credentials of
the admin and some more times in that month apparently. The cloud environment was
assessed once again in March, June and finally, on July 4, 2018, the security breach occurred
(Lomas, 2018). After it is identified and found that attack has taken place the Timehop’s
engineer immediately has locked the attacker and has implemented the security actions for
service restoring for the users. Timehop stated that no data can be accessed by the
unauthorised user as the system has access tokens that do not allow the unauthorized social
media access. Timehop’s de-authorized the tokens and they are not valid.
How it occurred?
The security breach occurred accidentally without the knowledge of the Timehop’s. the
damage caused to the Timehop’s was limited because of the commitment to use only data
which is required for providing the services. As the Timehop had never stored the data like
financial information of the user, bank card information, and more private information so the
loss was not huge (Lomas, 2018).
Vulnerabilities that were exploited and point of failures
 The major cause of this security breach was underestimating the risk that is Timehop
has ignored the activities done at previous access to their cloud computing
environment.
 Also, this security breach may be because of some employees which are not
trustworthy.
 This security breach may be due to the denial of service which is the most common
attack on the cloud computing environment.
 The security breach in the Timehop may be due to the insecure application
programming interfaces as the cloud environment has the public IP address.
 Maybe the Timehop environment might have the inadequate due diligence
 The admin account of Timehop has got hijacked.

 The security breach was due to the shared vulnerabilities (Ma, 2015).
Recommendations for mitigating the risks and failures in future
These types of a security breach can be mitigated in the following ways;
 Threats can be identified by correlating international security intelligence with the
alerts in real time.
 A traffic monitoring can be implemented on the network for getting an alert whenever
the network gets accessed by any user.
 The detection or monitoring of the intrusion to keep a check on the cloud environment
to identify the person banging constantly and their actions on the Timehop cloud
environment (Parms, 2016).
 For ensuring the system integrity a check should be kept on vulnerable areas.
 The security breach risk can also be mitigated by implementing access management
that is MFA for credentialing and authenticating user’s credentials.
 Implementing the SSO that is single sign-on in the Timehop. SSO are several
accounts set up for managing the users who visit the organization.
 Cloud computing Servers needs to make extra secure (Seshachala, 2015).
Any more recommendations to mitigate the security breach risk?
What are the advanced persistent threats?

References
Lomas, N. (2018). Timehop discloses July 4 data breach affecting 21 million. Retrieved from
https://techcrunch.com/2018/07/09/timehop-discloses-july-4-data-breach-affecting-21-
million/
Ma, J. (2015). Top 10 Security Concerns for Cloud-Based Services. Retrieved from
https://www.incapsula.com/blog/top-10-cloud-security-concerns.html
Parms, J. (2016). How to mitigate your cloud computing risks. Retrieved from
https://www.itproportal.com/2016/02/18/how-to-mitigate-your-cloud-computing-risks/
Seshachala, S. (2015). Data breach prevention and mitigation. Retrieved from
https://cloudacademy.com/blog/data-breach-prevention-mitigation/