The Capital One Case Study

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An attack on Capital One in the year 2019 has targeted the privacy of approximately 100 million customers. Capital One confirms that an outsider has unauthorized access and access to certain types of personal information about Capital One credit card customers and individuals who have applied for loan products (Lu, 2019).

The attackers have seemingly taken the opposite approach of the ransomware targets, attacking them by exploiting a newly discovered bug in the way each financial institution dealt with their customer information.

Capital One feel these losses could be made up or recovered through their insurance but have been unable to locate a sufficient company to cover the costs of their payment card losses. Capital tackled the issue and quickly started collaborating with federal law enforcement agencies (Lu, 2019).

According to their study, this has affected approximately 100 million people in the United States and about 6 million in Canada. It is important to note that no amount of credit information or guarantees has been compromised and at least one percent of public safety numbers have been compromised.

In addition, the FBI found the stranger who had taken the records. The government said it believes the data was recovered and there is no evidence that the information was used for fraud or disclosure by that person (Bunker, 2020).

Most of the information was available is information about customers and small enterprises, when they requested one of our accounts from 2005 until the beginning of 2019. This information includes the personal information of Capital One, collected immediately after receiving the credit card. including name, address, zip code, phone number, email address, date of birth and receipt of reports by the person (Bunker, 2020).

References

Lu, J. (2019). Assessing The Cost, Legal Fallout of Capital One Data Breach.

Bunker, G. (2020). Targeted cyber-attacks: how to mitigate the increasing risk. Network Security, 2020(1), 17-19.

A cyberattack is an attack executed by hackers to other computers. The attack can be based on an attack to destroy the other computer or to access the information found in the computer being attacked by the hacker or acquire the administrator rights in the same computer (Amoroso, 2012).

Several cyberattacks have been reported in recent newsletters and journals concerning attacks to big companies and organizations including the government’s critical infrastructure. The most recent attacks are executed using the most recent technologies and signatures that can allow hackers to access the systems (Liu, Li, Shuai & Wen, 2016).

In this discussion, I am going to discuss a ransomware attack that occurred in Texas in August 2019 (Fruhlinger, 2019). A ransomware attack is an attack that the attacker codes a software that holds the users of a computer system in an organization “slave” until they pay a ransom of cash for the hacker to remove the software.

The attack occurred in 22 small towns in Texas where the computer systems were rendered useless, and the government was not able to process and issue birth certificates and death certificates.

The attack was executed by a single attacker who used the REvil/Sodinokibi ransomware (Fruhlinger, 2019). How he managed to execute this attack is that there was a weakness in the provider’s side who provided the system, and it was too small to support the staff of IT working full-time.

When such attacks occur, the organization is not required to run into paying the ransom but should first analyze and find where the weakness was that it allowed the attacker to execute the attack.

For the case of the Texas organizations that were affected by the attack, they teamed up and found a solution to resolving the computer systems back to their normal functioning after knowing what and where was the weakness (Fruhlinger, 2019).

Some other places outside Texas did not resolve the situation back immediately, but it took them a few months before restoring their computer systems. The region that took time before restoring the computer systems to their normal functioning is Baltimore.

References

Amoroso, E. (2012). Cyber-attacks: protecting national infrastructure. Elsevier.

Fruhlinger, J. (2019). What is a cyber-attack? Recent examples show disturbing trends. Retrieved from https://www.csoonline.com/article/3237324/what-is-a-cyber-attack-recent-examples-show-disturbing-trends.html

Liu, X., Li, Z., Shuai, Z., & Wen, Y. (2016). Cyber-attacks against the economic operation of power systems: A fast solution. IEEE Transactions on Smart Grid, 8(2), 1023-1025.

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