It’s all too familiar, another day another breach. And this time, it's computer manufacturer Acer which will pay the costs...
Here We Go Again...
Computer manufacturer Acer, has formally alerted the California Attorney General’s Office, in accordance to US law, that a number of consumer accounts have been compromised. It has now been reported that the number of compromised accounts is in the region of 34,000 with complete customer transactional details exposed. Details including customer names, addresses, and full payment card details potentially accessed by an unauthorised external source.
Corrective Action - Customer Notification...
A letter to at risk customers who held accounts on the companies e-commerce site admits the breach has affected customers in the United States, Canada and Puerto Rico occurred between May 12th 2015 and April 28th 2016 which implies the breach went undetected for some time.
Post Breach Investigation Begins...
The question remains with all breaches, how was unauthorised access achieved? Was it via an unpatched device serving the perimeter, was it a vulnerability in the database behind the e-commerce site, could it have been a combination of many unfortunate coincidences? What cannot be questioned is that illegal access was obtained to systems that should only be accessed by system administrators. Without audit capabilities on key accounts, it’s impossible to pinpoint which account could have been the source of the breach.
It was also mentioned, even though this was highly important consumer transactional data, sitting on systems only accessible by privileged accounts, that the data was held in a database in an unencrypted format.
Words of Wisdom...
Consider this comment from Daniel Miessler, director of advisory services for IOActive, “The worst kind of reputation damage comes not from incidents, but from the appearance of incompetence or negligence. These are the feelings in customers or investors that can truly harm a company's value over time as it relates to data breach. In short, breaches are not all the same, and therefore do not affect companies the same. And the difference is mostly about the response by the company and what that response says about the underlying health of their security.” Judge for yourself if Acer has done enough to start the process of regaining customer trust, Formal Customer Notification.
Corrective Action - Prevention...
In light of all of this - the daily battle between cyber-crime and cyber security - the question arises: how can organisations control privileged accounts and protect themselves from damaging breaches? Wallix’s WAB Suite is the most cost-effective, complete and undisruptive of solutions. It protects your privileged accounts (what hackers look for to secure a way into your systems) from both internal and external attacks and lets you control, monitor and record administrator sessions across multiple systems, so you always know who’s looking at and doing what.
