Target & Breach Anatomy

Anatomy of the Breach : Vulnerabilities of Target Action and Reaction post Breach
 The Target posted their supplier names on the Internet which
 Upon releasing the outbreak of the breach, the target published an open
led to the exposure of one of their suppliers “Fazio
letter to their dear customers apologizing for the great loss and notified
Mechanical Services” and attackers took advantage of this
them on their progressive investigation to win back their love and trust
vulnerability and progressed on their attack using the
in near future.
supplier’s credentials and several other security weaknesses
attached to it.
 Considering the massive loss, the first action of communicating their
 They lacked in effective security provisioning and customer and ensuring to bring things to the right place was important.
They kept on investigating to find the real security vulnerabilities.
monitoring of their systems. If they would have facilitated a
black and white list of authorized/unauthorized resources
 The U.S. Department of Justice, Secret Service Personnel and target
and processes, they could have tackled the situation in a
executives met to dig in and find & remove malwares from POS ad
better manner.
related servers following which they notified all the banks and payment
 Once new accounts were created, they didn’t even monitor processors about the breach.
and supervise wisely.
 They should have proactively acted on all early fault and fraud detection
 Ideally, suspicious external servers should be blocked from alarms & simultaneously install stronger security mechanisms they
lacked in place to prevent any further attacks. Also, should have
accessing their systems, but the target failed to take care of
excluded all external payment processor vendors for the linking between
this as well.
POS devices and acquiring banks as few of them were major victims of
hackers.