Capital One Cyber Breach – Is Your Business Protected?

Yet another massive data breach hits, this one at Capital One. Although the details are still coming together, what we do believe factual is that over 100 million records of individuals applying for credit in the United States and Canada may have been impacted. Of those records, 140,000 Social Security numbers and 80,000 bank accounts have likely been exposed.

In reviewing the complaint against Paige A. Thompson, it indicates that:

…a firewall misconfiguration permitted commands to reach and be executed by that server, which enabled access to folders or buckets of data in Capital One's storage space at the cloud computing company Amazon Web Services...

I am sure in the coming days and weeks there will be a lot of finger-pointing and blame to go around, but one thing is for sure, breaches and hacks of this nature are not going away. In fact, I would argue that they will likely become more prevalent and commonplace.

So is there anything that business owners can do to HELP safeguard the information that may be under their control?

Absolutely!

At Withum, we are the world’s “Trusted Advisors.” Our team of professionals consists primarily of Certified Public Accountants (CPAs). As CPAs we “own” the audit space.

Over two years ago our profession released the framework on a new audit that can only be provided by CPAs….a SOC for Cybersecurity Report. This report assists organizations as they communicate relevant and useful information about the effectiveness of their cybersecurity risk management programs.

Our managing director of Advisory Services, Jim Bourke (jbourke@withum.com) is a leader in this space, traveling around the globe assisting companies in protecting private and confidential information. He and his team of professionals are available to discuss your company’s cybersecurity readiness concerns 24/7.