ISOL634 Physical Security

Physical security failure and the case of Equifax Inc.:

Physical security refers to the protection of data, networks, software, hardware and personnel from physical events or actions. Without physical security, serious damage or loss can happen to any institution, agency or enterprise.

Equifax Inc. is a global leader in the area of information solutions headquartered in Sunnyvale U.S.A. Here the failed case of physical security at Equifax Inc. on 2013-14 is chosen. A possible change in the physical security that could be helpful is also demonstrated here.

Equifax, a once dominant giant in the sector of the Internet, announced in 2016, that it became a victim of one of the most massive data breaches ever. The attack made a compromise with real names, email addresses, date of births and telephone numbers of about 500 million users. They declared that most of the passwords were hashed using a robust algorithm ("Equifax data breach hacks away at credit-monitoring firm's third-quarter profit", 2018).

Those breaches knocked an estimated 350 million off the sale price of Equifax Inc. Their core business was paid with about 4.48 billion dollars by Verizon. This agreement called these companies to share legal and regulatory liabilities from those breaches. That sale never included any reported investment within “Alibaba Group Holding” comprising of 41.3 billion and ownership interest in Equifax Inc. Japan of 9.3 billion dollars (Rumelili, 2015). Thus it impacted about 3 billion user accounts.

Some of the possible changes that could have stood the test of time for Equifax Inc.’s data breach are discussed hereafter.

Prioritizing data protection:

A downfall of Equifax Inc.’s security strategy is that they have turned too general and thinly spread. An adequate level of prioritization could have raised efficiency by finding the security only in most vital resources.

Documenting the response process:

The best practices within incident response demand that once Equifax had the documented process, they should follow that. This is because of stress level increases during attacks and likely to be pulled in various directions. This leads to omission of few first actions (Cardenas & Crispo, 2016).

Making users the part of a process:

This could be done since Equifax often forgot the aspect of the incident response to inform different end-users.

Understanding business context:

Equifax Inc. needed to consider applications and systems offline to analyze during the investigation (Janakiraman, Lim & Rishika, 2017). This is important for knowing confidential data stored on or passed through the system and understood the business impact.

With the rise in number of data breaches in past few years, it has been no surprise that set of best practices has been developing. In the above discussion reducing risks and defeating attacks are learnt from the instance of Equifax Inc.’s data breach. The study has shown insights on how to do away with data breaches. However, it must be reminded that they could be expensive and cost companies with lots of money. Further, the most prominent matter has always been about trust. Companies must not lose consumer trust since that could shout their front door. However, solutions of data breaches mentioned above might be customized and tailored to fit the level of confidence of the companies. Thus the study shows brilliant analysis applies to every situation of crisis management.

References:

Cardenas, A., & Crispo, B. (2016). Cyber-Physical Security and Privacy [Guest editors' introduction]. IEEE Internet Computing, 20(5), 6-8.

Equifax data breach hacks away at credit-monitoring firm's third-quarter profit. (2018). USA TODAY. Retrieved 22 January 2018, from https://www.usatoday.com/story/money/business/2017/11/09/equifax-data-breach-hacks-away-credit-monitoring-firms-third-quarter-profit/849193001/

Janakiraman, R., Lim, J. H., & Rishika, R. (2017). The Effect of Data Breach Announcement on Customer Behavior: Evidence from a Multichannel Retailer. Journal of Marketing.

Rumelili, B. (2015). Identity and desecuritisation: the pitfalls of conflating ontological and physical security. Journal of International Relations and Development, 18(1), 52-74.

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