Late afternoon on October 2nd, news leaked out of another large security data breach, now at Scottrade. The identity count of records, in the millions again (4.6 million is the latest). This breach comes on the second day of national CyberSecurity month, the first being Experian/T-Mobile breach.
Now unlike any other breach in recent days, this one has a noticeable and major twist. Scottrade did not identify the breach themselves and their security defenses did not detect that data was being extracted. Instead, federal officials approached Scottrade and informed them that they have a problem. For the first time, all the layers put in place failed, including the human components of an organization, failed. The question then becomes, was this a new Advanced Persistent Threat that circumvented all of their security or was security lax enough that the inflitration occured just like many of the other recent breaches we read about everyday. It surely supports the statistics the most executives believe they have been breached and did not know about it. Obtaining details on this breach, just like Anthem, Target, Sony, Carbanak Bank, etc. will be provide critical lessons on how to design and implement the proper security defenses in addition to best practices.
As you can see, CyberSecurity month is starting with a bang. Personally, over the weekend, I received a letter from one of my credit card providers indicating yet another merchant was breached and I should be vigilant about checking my credit card account for fraud. While the letter assured me I will not be responsible for any fraudulent charges and extra security profiling has been added to my account, I can only imagine where the next big breach will come from and who will be affected. As a case in point, fallout from Experian is just materializing and it is important to note that it was T-Mobile data hosted by Experian that was compromised and not T-Mobile themselves. Vendor specific data hosted by another company and both are grossly affected.
Thus, we have two business days into the month, two major data breaches announced, and countless little compromises warranting consumer notification of specific problems. If the trend holds, things are shaping up for an interesting month. As these situations evolve, BeyondTrust will continue to monitor this data breach (and others) and provide updates via our blogs and media outlets. If you have any questions on how BeyondTrust can help secure privileged access to sensitive data, which everyone knows is the crux of whats being leaked, please feel to contact us here.
Morey J. Haber, Chief Security Officer, BeyondTrust
Morey J. Haber is the Chief Security Officer at BeyondTrust. He has more than 25 years of IT industry experience and has authored three books: Privileged Attack Vectors, Asset Attack Vectors, and Identity Attack Vectors. He is a founding member of the industry group Transparency in Cyber, and in 2020 was elected to the Identity Defined Security Alliance (IDSA) Executive Advisory Board. Morey currently oversees BeyondTrust security and governance for corporate and cloud based solutions and regularly consults for global periodicals and media. He originally joined BeyondTrust in 2012 as a part of the eEye Digital Security acquisition where he served as a Product Owner and Solutions Engineer since 2004. Prior to eEye, he was Beta Development Manager for Computer Associates, Inc. He began his career as Reliability and Maintainability Engineer for a government contractor building flight and training simulators. He earned a Bachelor of Science degree in Electrical Engineering from the State University of New York at Stony Brook.