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Data Integrity and Incident Response

By Benjamin Dynkin, Barry Dynkin and E.J. Hilbert
December 01, 2017

Imagine the following: Cyber criminals attack a credit reporting agency, compromising 143 million American records — one of the largest data breaches on record. While the attack is incredibly impactful, these cyber criminals, looking to cripple the financial sector, use the data breach as a smoke screen to surreptitiously attack the credit reporting agency's data collection, analysis and reporting systems, which in totality ensure that no data produced by the reporting agency can be relied upon. Once discovered, the attack on the integrity of the agency's data causes all credit data to be rendered useless, utterly devastating the entire financial market and causing widespread distrust of financial institutions across the world.

While this may seem like a contrived example pulled from the pages of a Mr. Robot script, it is certainly a possibility that could have happened in the now infamous Equifax data breach, which was first disclosed on Sept. 7, 2017. The skill required to successfully exfiltrate 143 million records is certainly sufficient to successfully attack the integrity of that very same data. It is generally accepted that cyber criminals have not performed integrity attacks because there is a minimal profit motive: Records have a black-market value; in integrity attacks, there is no deliverable that can be sold.

This paradigm may be shifting. There are two key pressures causing this shift. First, as criminals become more sophisticated financial actors, they will be able to take significant, leveraged, short positions on a variety of securities, which they know would crash on news breaking about the attack. In addition to this form of sophistication, cyber criminals are also learning and developing business strategies for black-market goods.

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