What The Target Breach And Edward Snowden Tell Us About Network Controls

The high-profile attack on retail giant Target stands out for several reasons.

• First, there’s the sheer scope of the theft.
• Next, it targeted (there’s no way avoid the pun) the retail industry, the repository of vast amounts of data on millions of consumers.
• Third, rather than a single announcement regarding the breach, there’s been a slow and constant drip of bad news. As far as we know (and we still don’t know much) the hacking began on Nov 27 and went on through Dec 15.

If the Target fiasco is one extreme, then the other breach that dominates the news -- Edward Snowden’s hacking of National Security Administration data -- is surely another. Despite different motivations of the hackers, both episodes clearly demonstrate that every organization relying on sensitive information from financial services and healthcare corporations to government agencies, is in its own way a target (there’s that word again).

[Eric Chiu is co-founder of HyTrust, a cloud security automation company.]