Human Aspects in Cybersecurity on a Private Organization and a Government Agency
In the contemporary digital environment where online communication and internet have become a necessity, the advancements in sophisticated modern technology have assisted both private and public organization to take the advantages of communication networking by expanding their network systems to facilitate information exchanges. Globally, more than 2 billion internet and 5 billion mobile phone users make connection daily. Moreover, people exchange over 294 billions emails, and over 5 billion messages daily. The convenience, and growing popularity of digital networks have made businesses to rely on internet networking to carry out daily tasks. Despite the benefits of internet technology both government agencies and private enterprises face increases risks by cyber attacks from different part of the world. Daily, cyber criminals continue to develop advanced and sophisticated hacking tools to steal data and other sensitive information from organizations. Typically, hackers use different tactics such as computer hacking, financial scams, email stalking and virus attacks to commit crimes. The first major cyber attacks happened in 2000 where 45 million computers globally were affected by virus. In 2010, the rates of global spam suddenly increased from 1.4% to 89.1%. In the last few years, a cyber crime global landscape has changed rapidly, criminals are using sophisticated technology as well as greater knowledge of advanced cyber security to penetrate the network systems of private and network systems of different organizations. The cyber espionage, cyber crimes and other cyber malicious activities have made several organizations to secure to a great financial loss of up to several billion of dollars. By 2010, the politically motivated cyber espionages have penetrated the business community leading to economic loss of hundred of billion dollars across different industries ranging from private business to non-governmental organizations.
The objective of this paper is to investigate the impact of cyber crime using the human factors perspectives on a small government agencies, a business...
The Target Corp (a private organization), government agency (Department of Defense) and a non-government organization (Community Health Systems)
The Target Corp
The Target Corporation is the second largest retail store in the United States apart from the Walmart, and has stores in more than 1,801 across the United States. The company retail format include discount store, hypermarket, TargetExpress, and CityTarget. The company mission statement is as flows:
"Our mission is to make Target the preferred shopping destination for our guests by delivering outstanding value, continuous innovation and an exceptional guest experience by consistently fulfilling our Expect More. Pay Less. brand promise"
"To support our mission, we are guided by our commitments to great value, the community, diversity and the environment." (Target, 2014 p 1).
Method Target Corp has been targeted
In 2014, the Target Corp announced that it had been a victim of cyber attack where hackers had stolen more than 70 million contact information, and over 40 million debit and credit cards of the Target customers. The Target announced that the stolen information include email, mailing addresses, and phone numbers of over 70 millions shoppers. Typically, the attack caused enormous damages to Target financial reputation making the stock prices to decline, which led to a resignation of the company Senior IT officer. The Target was attacked because the company refused to integrated security tools in their infrastructure despite a series of security warning from the federal government. Typically, Target Corp was vulnerable to attack because the company did not use the sophisticated security system to protect their payment system. Although, the government sent memo to the company executives that that the attackers were targeting the payment system, and despite this warning, the company ignored the warning.…
