Equifax Cyber Breach
Assignment
In 2017, one of the biggest cyberattacks ever to occur was caused by the failure of the management and IT staff at a well-known, very large enterprise to take the necessary action to prevent the hacking the personal information of over 800 million customers. The ability of the black hats to penetrate the technology portal at mega-giant Equifax and steal personal information was determined to be the simple failure to apply a patch to fix a known risk referred to as the Apache Struts vulnerability. An alert had been promulgated and the employees at Equifax knew of the vulnerability, and even ran some scans, but never applied the patch that would have prevented the reconnaissance and penetration of the data farm at Equifax. The credit-reporting agency had two months to apply the fix before the cybercriminals began stealing the data.
Discuss
For this assignment, research a recent cybersecurity issue that had a considerable impact on an enterprise.
- Describe in detail the recent cybersecurity issue that you selected.
- How was the enterprise impacted?
- What could have been done to prevent the incident?
Answer preview
Equifax officially announced the cybercrime leading to identity theft on the 7th of September 2017. The firm confirmed that personal information of an approximate of 145.5 million of its customers in the U.S. alone remained under security compromise. British customers represented a whopping 44 million, branding the breach as one of the greatest breaches of metadata in history. Equifax suffered in different ways from the breach as different departments and sectors went through the breach (Smith & Mulrain, 2017). The first sector to receive exposure represented the Argentinian customer data. After the announcement of the breach, the firm realized that anybody who entered…
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