Data breaches are all too common this day and age. It’s not even mentioned as big news, just put on the side notes or back burner. Most breaches happen because of people’s carelessness, followed by corrupt individuals. In turn one has to ask, how do these breaches occur? Here are five reasons.
- Stolen credentials: Passwords obtained from stolen or lost phones/computers, the careless disposal of old devices, malware or data stolen in another data breech are the leading cause of network intrusion.
- Data stealing malware: Used in the breaches at Home Depot and Target recently, this is software that steals data, whether it is passwords, credit cards, keystrokes or any of a number of other types of private data.
- Phishing: The act of pretending to be a trusted entity for the sole purpose of eliciting usernames, passwords, birth date, Social Security Numbers, etc. from an unsuspecting target.
- RAM Scraping: This is the act of capturing data being temporarily stored in RAM, as happened in the infamous Target breach. There is a millisecond of time between a debit card swipe and bank approval of the transaction. It is during this holding period that the data is unencrypted, and is thus vulnerable to capture.
- Backdoor Malware: Malware delivered as a Trojan that attacks unpatched security vulnerabilities.
Work Cited
Bazen, Barry. “Big Data, Big Breaches, BIG PROBLEMS AHEAD?” Pulse. LinkedIn. 24 September 2014.
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