Assignment: Security Incident Case

Josephine Wolff’s book “You’ll See This Message When It Is Too Late” includes a number of case studies. In chapters 2-10, each chapter is a case study of a specific cybersecurity incident that happened in the last 10-20 years. For this assignment, you will need to read one of these chapters and write a short summary report on it.

The list of 9 cybersecurity incidents covered by the Wolff book:

• TJ Maxx breach (financial)
• South Carolina Department of Revenue (financial)
• GameOver Zeus (financial)
• Diginotar (espionage)
• China PLA 61398 (espionage)
• OPM breach (espionage)
• Spamhaus DoS (doxxing)
• Sony Breach (doxxing)
• Ashley Madison (doxxing)

In class, you will be assigned one of the 9 cybersecurity incidents covered in this book. You should start by reading the chapter about that incident. This is important; you’ll need to know what happened. I think you’ll also find it really interesting.

After reading the chapter, you have two more tasks:

First, you need to find a second source of information about what happened. Use Google, use Wikipedia, find a news article, or something. Find out what has happened since related to this incident or as a result of this incident. These are all (relatively) famous incidents; what has happened related to cybersecurity since these incidents? Did we implement new laws or policies in response? Have we learned how to prevent these attacks, or could these same attackers do it again? You only need to find one additional source for your paper.

Second, you need to write up a brief summary of what you learned. In one page, please describe: 1) who was the attacker and what was their motivation; 2) who was the victim; 3) what vulnerabilities did the attacker exploit (how did they do it?); 4) what suggestions does Dr. Wolff suggest to stop similar problems in the future; and 5) have we done those? are similar attacks still happening? Additionally, please cite your additional source in your paper.

This is not intended to be a long or complicated assignment. It should hopefully be simple: read the chapter about the incident, google it, and then summarize it. It is possible to do this in less than one page, and there is a maximum of 3 pages for this assignment. And it should hopefully be interesting; each of these incidents is a real-life cyber attack that actually happened!

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