How did this breach occur

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Reference no: EM134003763

Assignment:

In 2019, one of the largest data breaches in history occurred when First American Financial Corporation, a real estate title insurance company, exposed over 885 million records on its public website. Included in these records was information such as Social Security numbers, bank account information, images of driver's licenses, mortgage statements, tax documents, and wire transfer records dating all the way back to 2003. The company was not aware of the problem until it was notified by security expert Brian Krebs, an outside source.

A real estate developer outside of FAF first noticed this concern when they found that anyone who knew the URL for a valid document could then access any other document simply by changing a number in the URL. The company's website, firstam.com, was leaking hundreds of millions of private documents not intended to be viewed by just any user. This means that any individual who had previously been emailed a link from FAF could possibly gain access to a plethora of sensitive and private documents. No authentication was required in order to access these documents, nor were they protected in any other way. This left a lot of personal and private information exposed for those with malicious intent to use in nefarious ways, for example, identity theft.

When FAF was notified of the breach, it shut down its website and immediately conducted an internal review. The initial findings noted that there was a "design defect in an application that made possible unauthorized access to customer data" (Newman, 2019). The identified defect could be referred to as a business logic flaw, which is "a category of vulnerabilities specific to an application and business domain . . . [It] allows an attacker to misuse the application by circumventing the business rules of the application" (Conikee, 2019). Only a user with an appropriate link would be able to access these documents. However, a user would not be asked to verify their identity. Therefore, access was easy and unauthenticated.

How did this breach occur? Briefly summarize the incident.
Which pillars of the CIA triad were explicitly violated, given the scenario?
What kinds of security controls could First American Financial Corporation have put in place to defend against this kind of data breach? Why?

Reference no: EM134003763

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