In 2010, Albert Gonzalez, a former Secret Service informant, was sentenced to 20 years in prison for hacking more than 130 million debit and credit card numbers, namely from the card processing company Heartland Payment Systems – the largest data breach in US history.
The Heartland data breach wasn’t the only one that Gonzalez perpetrated. Gonzalez is also responsible for cyber security hacking breaches into companies such as Dave & Busters, OfficeMax, WetSeal, JC Penney, Hannaford Brothers, DSW, and TJX Companies (who owns a string of well-known retail chains such as HomeGoods), among others.
During the trial and sentencing of Albert Gonzalez, the US government's memo claimed companies, banks, and insurers lost close to $200 million, and that Gonzalez's credit and debit card thefts "victimized a group of people whose population exceeded that of many major cities and some states."
Gonzalez may have been a professional, self-taught hacker, but it didn’t take much effort on his part to drive by (literally), log onto hundreds of retailer’s unsecured wireless networks using sniffers, and hack into their POS databases in order to steal a collective of hundreds of millions worth of Personally Identifiable Information (PII).
Simply put: if the companies involved in these data breaches had bothered to secure their wireless networks properly, these data breaches wouldn’t have occurred.
Unfortunately, many companies do not take server and network security as seriously as they should, which in turn leads to extremely lax methods of security. This inadvertently makes their entire company’s data excessively vulnerable to attackers, which hackers like Gonzalez are happy to capitalize on.
What Modern Data Breaches Have in Common
The 2019 Verizon Data Breach Investigations Report (DBIR) covers 41,686 security incidents from both the US Secret Service and Verizon itself, including approximately 800 new data breach instances since last year’s report. In the report, we can see that many data breaches have key similarities, which we can learn from
According to the 2019 DBIR, these are some of the commonalities that exist between the data breaches:
76% of data was compromised from servers.
89% of victims subject to the PCI-DSS compliance protocol had not achieved compliance, a 10% increase from the previous year.
96% of breaches were avoidable through simple or relatively intermediate controls.
From these insights, we can see that one of the best ways to avoid data breaches is by using proper security controls and meeting cyber security standards and IT compliance.
How Foxpass Protects Your Networks
When Gonzalez hacked all those retailers, he did it by accessing their unsecured Wi-Fi networks. If those networks featured security that could keep unauthorized users at bay, the companies could have protected their customers and financial data.
Foxpass provides that exact kind of security. Foxpass secures networks by preventing unauthorized users and devices from connecting, even without needing a Wi-Fi password. This makes it easy for users to connect while keeping strangers, hackers, and cyber attackers away.
Foxpass uses multiple secure access and authentication technologies, including cloud RADIUS, PKI, cloud LDAP, and SSH Keys. These provide several layers of security, including multi-factor authentication, so users can verify their identities. Unauthorized users, on the other hand, will be kept out of the network, so they can’t steal data, and the companies maintain security compliance.
Foxpass helps secure your networks & servers, so you don’t end up on one of these data breach lists – while ensuring you the peace of mind that comes with becoming compliant.
Upgrade Your Security
Want to see how Foxpass can protect your business from data breaches and hackers? Click here to learn how Foxpass can help you avoid costly security mistakes:
