Details of the Target Credit Card Breach
Long and interesting article about the Target credit card breach from last year. What’s especially interesting to me is that the attack had been preventable, but the problem was that Target messed up its incident response.
In testimony before Congress, Target has said that it was only after the U.S. Department of Justice notified the retailer about the breach in mid-December that company investigators went back to figure out what happened. What it hasn’t publicly revealed: Poring over computer logs, Target found FireEye’s alerts from Nov. 30 and more from Dec. 2, when hackers installed yet another version of the malware. Not only should those alarms have been impossible to miss, they went off early enough that the hackers hadn’t begun transmitting the stolen card data out of Target’s network. Had the company’s security team responded when it was supposed to, the theft that has since engulfed Target, touched as many as one in three American consumers, and led to an international manhunt for the hackers never would have happened at all.
This is exactly the sort of thing that my new company, Co3 Systems, solves. All of those next-generation endpoint detection systems, threat intelligence feeds, and so on only matter if you do something in response to them. If Target had had incident response procedures in place, and a system in place to ensure they followed those procedures, it would have been much more likely to have responded to the alerts it received from FireEye.
This is why I believe that incident response is the most underserved area of IT security right now.