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Target Fraud Case Study

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Risk sources
Even though Target did such a huge investment in cybersecurity to protect the information, it failed to secure the confidential information from the hackers in 2013 because of the several reasons.
Incompetent Employees
The main reason for Target being hacked by the hackers in 2013 is because of lack of skillful employees in the organizations. Those employees who were supposed to keep eye on any suspicious activities ignored its own security controls. When the security system alerted the Target employees, they didn't react to the attack warning (Kerner, 2014). It clearly says that the employees of the Target are incompetent.
Rogue Employees
When one of the employee of HVAC firm Fazio Mechanical services responded back to the phishing email, the whole story of Target data breach started. It sounds like that employee lacks proper training in cybercrimes, and was ignorant as well. Similarly, the internal employee who deactivated the feature of the software that will automatically eliminate the suspicious software is another contributing factor that invited the data breach. In addition, Target employees ignored the multiple alerts which were detected by the antivirus installed in …show more content…
Here, a 22-year-old Ukrainian was identified as the main suspect. He along with other hackers are the main risk factor who allegedly enter the systems and steal the information, and sold it in the black market.
Business Partners
The HVAC firm Fazio Mechanical Services is one of the vendors who has remote access to the Target’s network. One of the main causes of Target data breach was the partnership with the firm whose employees were not well trained and not smart enough. Because of one respond to the hacker’s phishing email by one employee, hackers got entered into Target’s network which led to the data

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