Computer Security Breaches
Internal Controls and Receivables
On December the 19th Target publicly acknowledged they had suffered a data breach, which had resulted in the loss of 40 million customer payment card details, along with their names, expiry dates, and the encrypted security codes (Munson, 2013), At the time this was one of the largest security breaches, with the firm suffering not just because they were targeted by criminals, but as a result of the failure of their internal controls.
The problem started when, in the run up to Thanksgiving, malware was installed on the payments system of Target (Riley, 2014). BlackPOS, which is also known as Kaptoxa, is malware designed for use on point of sales systems which operate on Microsoft Windows (Krebs, 2014). The Malware operates at the point of sales, when the customers' cards are swiped on an infected point of sale, the malware becomes active and at card details would be sent to a server within Target that had been commandeered by the criminals (Riley, 2014). Following the gathering of the payment card on the commandeered server the hackers had to upload the exfiltration malware to extract the details for their own use (Riley, 2013)....
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