Darleen Busot
BIS/221
February 2, 2015
James Boykin
Preventing Security Breaches
The era of the Internet is giving people many tools and advantages that help them been available at any time and place and they are been more productive. It has also helped corporations becoming efficient and increased their exposure to the public. All pros come with cons, and the Internet cons are affecting people and corporations as well. People and companies are been exposed to the dark side of the Internet with security breaches.
Security breach is the new way of thieves taking advantages of others by stealing personal data, credit cards, and social security numbers for financial benefit. Companies are also suffering from this problem with hackers stealing information from their servers for a very lucrative business. Security breaches are very costly and difficult to fix it causes a chain reaction that not only affects the person or company involved it affects others.
In April 2014 Home Depot, the largest home improvement company in the world, had one of the biggest company security breaches in history. All their customer’s credit card information was stolen and compromised. Upon joint investigation with a third party company and law enforcement it was determined that criminal used a third party vendor to steal the data from their servers. The hackers used malwares on the checkout system to steal customer’s credit and debit cards information to be sold in the black market. The malware that was sent to their systems has never been seen before, and it was highly design to evade detection (Home Depot, 2014).
Preventing security breaches is important for corporations as well for individuals. Viruses, Trojan horses, and worms can infect computer systems having major effects on the affected party. Most viruses and malwares are received via email, dubious websites, and instant messaging’s with links. Existing prevention software’s can only determine