Cybersecurity News CYBR650 Week 5

I’ve been looking forward to Weeks 5 and 6, even though I’m a little apprehensive about analyzing systems and data centers. The reading materials provide a lot of valuable information to help with the assignments. A description of the systems, networks, servers, and computers, and policies, standards, and procedures play a great role in systems analysis.

This week I’d like to focus on something that is currently at the top of cybersecurity news – the Facebook data breach. Although it seems outrageous that the personal information for more than 87 million users was compromised during the Cambridge Analytica data breach, a lot of security experts were sounding big warnings during the past decade. Additionally, more than a million users in each of the UK, Philippines and Indonesia may have also had their personal information compromised, with about 310,000 users in Australian. We’re told the number of users affected in the United States could actually be higher than the 87 million that was announced. Read more about it here http://time.com/5234740/facebook-data-misused-cambridge-analytica/ and here https://www.theguardian.com/technology/2018/apr/08/facebook-to-contact-the-87-million-users-affected-by-data-breach. What is even more alarming, is that Cambridge Analytica used data obtained from these illegally accessed Facebook profiles to build a program to predict and influence voters. I say we shift our focus from Russia to Facebook when it comes to meddling in our elections! To make matters worse, more than 63,000 New Zealand users were also exposed, it was announced yesterday. Thankfully, that country’s privacy commissioner is working with his counterparts in the US, UK Australia and Canada to determine the severity and consequences of the privacy beach. Read more here https://www.theguardian.com/technology/2018/apr/10/facebook-data-breach-hits-63714-new-zealanders-after-10-people-download-quiz. 

It seems that Facebook did not learn from the many other companies who have suffered data breaches; even though Facebook discovered the data breach in late 2015, it did not alert users immediately. They probably tried to contain the breach in the hopes of maintaining the company brand, but alas, like our data breaches, word gets out sooner or later, and when done later, with major consequences! I must say I was not impressed with Mark Zuckerberg’s acknowledgement that he didn’t take a broad enough view of the company’s responsibilities! I mean, come on! You’re running the most influential and popular social media platform of all time, with more than a billion users, and he didn’t take a ‘broad enough view of the company’s responsibilities’? The fact that Facebook suffered a data breach of this magnitude and displayed such ignorance and lack of responsibility is quite appalling. 

To me, the bigger concern is who exactly has access to our data, and what are they using our data for. The issue of data harvesting and the threat it poses to our personal privacy is quite alarming. Our smartphones now store and transmit personal and sensitive information that we once kept locked away in our safes at home and in the office. We carry our personal identification information, our banking and credit card information, and login information to a host of other services; all of which could be very detrimental to us if it falls into the wrong hands. Our apps on our smartphones also have access to a lot of valuable and classified data. Data harvesting is big business today, and data companies are adding to the amount of data they have access to, and can sell or otherwise pass on to other entities. Some companies use the data they collect to determine and often dictate our likes and dislikes, our buying behaviors and patterns, our income levels, our hobbies, our personalities … and sell them to companies who are hungry to get their hands onto a particular market or target audience. It doesn’t help that companies like Equifax, who also recently suffered a major data breach, hold a treasure hove of valuable personal data on consumers.