The informatics solutions help the organizations to manage data of the process, clients, providers, payment methods, and supply chain. The informatics solutions work as networks from centralized data centers in several countries in the world as United States of America, Canada, Ireland and Iceland. There are companies that store their data centers in their warehouses under their maintenance and surveillance, but most of the corporations of the world give that responsibility to a third company that provides the hardware, maintenance, and security service. The data centers while they are connected 24 hours and 365 days a year to the internet, there is always a probability of receiving a cyber-attack. The cyber-attack is possible thanks to a security breach discovered by an experienced hacker. Most of the attacks that are executed to the security breaches of the organization cause economic and non-economic consequences to the organization (McGrath, 2014).
The most important non-economic consequence is the loss of reputation of an organization, depending on the economic category of the organization; the impact will increase their severity. A company that manages customers and providers information as bank accounts, credit cards, payable accounts, purchase history and preferences will have a higher impact on the reputation of an organization than another organization with less information management.
Target Inc. suffered a data breach violation in 2013 between November 27th and December 15th on the eve of the Black Friday. More than 70 million clients suffered subtraction of personal data from the data centers of Target Inc., including credit cards numbers, expiry dates, and secret verification codes. The cyber-criminals installed a malware in the point-of-sale system of the company stealing credit card information of the clients. The company silently removed the malware from all the registers of the company. The problem was public when a blog reported the data breach and the public investigations begun. The company received complaints from the clients and government representatives affecting the reputation of the company in front of their clients and the public opinion. JP Morgan Chase placed daily limits to the credit card of customers affected by the Target Inc. data breach. In other cases, they canceled thousands of credit cards (CLARK, 2014).
The economic consequence of the data breach is the control loss of the bank accounts and point of sales of the company with millions of dollars in risk. In the long term, caused by the bad reputation of the company is the reduction in gross sales. Target Inc. reduced its transactions in 4% in the Christmas Eve compared with the Christmas Eve of 2012. Another consequence of the data breach was the lay-off of 475 employees in the Minneapolis headquarters and 700 positions worldwide. The total cost of the data breach was 200 million dollars and 100 million dollars additional that the company committed to invest in improving the point-of-sale technology before early 2015. The Chief Executive Officer of the company, Gregg Steinhafel resigned to its position in 2014.
The vulnerabilities in the data centers of the corporations have the potential to receive cyber-attacks and cause economic and non-economic impact to the corporation, clients, and providers. The organization is working together with antivirus and cyber-protection companies to develop new strategies and shields against cyber-attacks in the future. Target after the data breach improved the point-of-sale system with the chip-and-pin technology widely used in Europe and Latin America.
Reference List
CLARK, M. (5 May 2014). Timeline of Target's Data Breach And Aftermath: How Cybertheft Snowballed For The Giant Retailer. Retrieved from International Business Times: http://www.ibtimes.com/timeline-targets-data-breach-aftermath-how-cybertheft-snowballed-giant-retailer-1580056
McGrath, M. (10 January 2014). Target Data Breach Spilled Info On As Many As 70 Million Customers. Retrieved from Forbes: http://www.forbes.com/sites/maggiemcgrath/2014/01/10/target-data-breach-spilled-info-on-as-many-as-70-million-customers/#7d351f576bd1
