RECENT CYBER ATTACKS
SANDEEP VEMULAPALLI
12917417
IA-606
ST.CLOUD STATE UNIVERSITY
SEP4, 2015

Cyber Attack:
The attempt of breaching the security layers of an organization or a system by disrupting the network and there by accessing, stealing, modifying or destroying the valuable data and using the data for fraudulent purposes, causing a loss to the organization is called a Cyber Attack

Origin:
The idea of cyber attacks began at the earlier development of World Wide Web (www) in this stage there was not much harm to the organization but as there was advancement in technology the number of hackers increased day by day and also the effectiveness of the hacking technology has increased a lot which results a severe damage to the organization In more recent times many organizations like manufacturing companies, IT companies, banks and health care providers have been prone to the cyber theft and they lost huge volume of information which incurred huge losses to the companies. Some of the examples include the attack on Target, Primera Blue Cross, E-Bay, JP Morgan Chase bank Sony PSN and many other. These attacks have happened because of poor security measures and the loopholes in the system by which hackers gained access and made the companies to compromise a huge volume of information.
Cyber Attack on Primera Blue Cross:
Primera blue cross is one of the leading insurance company in Washington .It has undergone a cyber attack on May 5th and the breach was not known till Jan 29th. The organization said that a large volume of 11 millions of its customers information like their Email id,Social Security Number, Date Of Birth, bank accounts and phone numbers have been exposed to them and now the company is working with FBI to investigate this cyber attack

Cyber-Attack on EBAY On 3 February 2014 EBAY has undergone a massive security breach where it has lost the information of the customers. The Hackers broke into their database and had stolen the login accounts of company’s senior employees who have access to customer’s ‘accounts. They stole the customer’s names, encrypted passwords, email-ids, phone numbers, birthday dates and also the security questions. Nearly 145 million users are requested to change their passwords by EBAY. This is biggest cyber-attack that eBay has ever faced losing all the valuable information of customers. Though the Company didn’t conform who is behind this attack, the Syrian Electronic Army claimed the responsibility.

Cyber-Attack on Social Networking Sites In recent years, the social networking sites like Facebook and Twitter have faced many cyber-attacks, losing a lot of user information. In 2013, Facebook has faced a security breach where 318,000 user accounts have been prone to cyber-attack. This happened due to the use of malicious key logger software called Pony. When the user goes to a particular website then the key logger software gets activated and the keystrokes of the user gets recorded and thereby getting the login information. Trust wave a privately held information security company that provides on demand security, found that the Facebook passwords are collected from October 21st and the key loggers are still active on some websites. The people behind these attacks are not found and the information collected is not made public. Twitter also been to the prone to cyber-attack. It has lost the information of 250000 people, their usernames and passwords, after which it discovered that their site is prone to attack. Twitter’s director of information security, Bob Lord said that the Hackers are very proficient and the same thing happened many other organizations like them. Many other sites like Adobe have also became of cyber-attack where it lost the information of 38 million users and the information is made online by placing the information in a zip file which can be downloaded by any other user. Along with this it also lost the source code of other adobe products.
Cyber-attack on Sony Sony, which is the leading giant in online gaming has undergone a cyber-attack. The Hackers who claim themselves as “Lizard Squad” had taken down several popular online video game networks. The hackers used a technique called Distributed Denial of Service (DDoS) attack where the network is flooded by illegitimate traffic, avoiding millions of users to play together. The Hackers also stole the credit card information of 77 million users and also making the play station network offline for 24 days. This attack incurred a loss of 171 million to the Sony, which is the major attack in the year 2011.
Cyber Attack on JP Morgan Bank JP Morgan Chase Bank, one of the Americas largest banking and financial institution has undergone a cyber-attack along with four other banks, in August 2014. The account details of customers have been compromised. The customer’s savings account and checking accounts have been hacked and their data is hijacked. The motivation behind this attack might be financial or as a part of Espionage. This is a hactivistic operation. They believe that Russian hackers might have been behind this attack but still it’s unclear. Thought the users account details were compromised the hackers didn’t steal the money from customers. If they have used the information of customers then JP Morgan Chase Bank could have incurred huge losses and could have been the biggest cyber-attack of this year.
LAWS ON CYBER ATTACKS: As the Cyber Attacks has increased due to the advancement in technology the government also has passed some laws. There are mainly three Federal Regulations on cyber attacks, they are * Health Insurance Portability and Accountability Act(HIPAA) in 1996 * Gram -Leach -Bliley Act in 1999 * Homeland Security Act in 2002
These all the Acts protects the data of Health Organizations, Insurance Companies etc..

REFERENCES
1) http://www.doctrackr.com/blog/bid/366752/The-Most-Devastating-Cyber-Attacks-of-2013
2) http://www.forbes.com/sites/jaymcgregor/2014/07/28/the-top-5-most-brutal-cyber-attacks-of-2014-so-far/