Over the span of the last twelve weeks, I have examined some of the breaches and hacks that have occurred. I chose this particular theme because I think if one is going to study cybersecurity, you need to have a strong understanding of where it can go wrong. One thing that I have noticed in several of my classes throughout this degree is that the cybersecurity professionals like to discuss what should be done to protect the system as if there is an infinite budget that a company can give to the IT department to protect things. In reality, companies MUST work with a limited budget, and IT will not get to use that entire budget. It has to be shared with the rest of the company. Therefore, it's fine to say that the company needs to have certain standards in place or use certain technology. But you really learn from studying what happens when you don't use those standards or technology. In the real world, you need to know how you will be affected and how you will overcome the problems.
Not long ago, I received my law degree. I remember having a similar argument with one of my law professors. He insisted that a better contract was needed between the parties, and that would have solved the problem. I replied that from what I had seen in my office and in my studies, that was probably a true answer, but it doesn't account for the fact that every single case we study involves a situation where the parties failed in some respect. Nobody goes to court when everything is going perfectly according to the contract. The parties in that particular case didn't draw their contracts carefully. How are they supposed to proceed now? Furthermore, what happens when I get a client that didn't have me do their contract; instead, they did it themselves, and now they are having problems, and I need to help them solve those problems. My professor didn't have a good answer.
The same is true in IT. If the company engaged in perfect security measures for their information at all times, there is no need for a cybersecurity degree. Everything is going smoothly, and no hackers exist. Unfortunately, that's a fictional world. Companies mess up and hackers want to exploit those mistakes. So how do we proceed in helping companies that have messed up? The easy answer is to simply throw money at the problem and fix it before it's ever a problem. That's a good answer in many respects. Create a strong system and there's less to do later. But how do you proceed if you are hired at a company that hasn't done that? You have to study how other systems were breached. You need to know what is occurring in the real world, and figure out how to make it work when it's imperfect.
I examined breaches and hacks because it's the imperfect side of business. These involve big and small companies. Some focused on the insider threats, whereas others were outside attacks. Some could have easily been fixed, while others are still perplexing years later. My goal was simply to shine a light on these past breaches in an attempt to learn more about them.
The assignment was valuable because it showed me where to look for breach causes. In some cases, I discovered the answer, and some I didn't. This exercise also taught me to think about other consequences, such as when I received a letter than my information was compromised for a company I had no dealings with. How did they get my information? Was this a proper use of my information, or were they not supposed to have it in the first place? These questions all drive at the root of discovering how breaches occur and what they affect.
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