Identifying a Major Breach in a Virtualized Environment Outline Identify a major breach of a virtualized environment that has occurred in the recent past (within the last five years). For your Portfol

Outline: Breach in a Virtualized Environment

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Outline: Breach in a Virtualized Environment

Introduction

Breaches can occur in any environment, whether physical or virtualized environments. Several factors contributed to the breach that occurred at Facebook. Therefore, understanding preventive measures could be an effective measure to curb the breaches.

Breach in a Virtualized Environment

One of the major breaches in a virtualized environment occurred when more than 540 million Facebook user records were publicly exposed on the Amazon cloud computing server (Silverstein, 2019; Rahmani et al., 2022; Li & Kumar, 2022; Yankson, 2022).

What happened was that two-third party Facebook app developers posted the records in plain sight, which caused another major data breach on one of the world's biggest social networking platforms. Therefore, the breach of the virtualized environment occurred because of an error made by the two-third party Facebook app developers when they posted the plain records in the eyes of the public.

The two major parties responsible for the breach in the virtualized environment were Cultura Colectiva and At the Pool. Cultura Colectiva is a Mexican-based media company that helped to uncover the fact that approximately 146 gigabytes of Facebook user data (including account names, identities, comments to posts, and specific reactions to posts had been exposed by Cultura Colectiva (Silverstein, 2019). This caused the biggest leak. On the other hand, At the Pool is a separate app that was held responsible for exposing databases that contained data with information such as user IDs, photos, friends, location check-ins, and even unprotected passwords for about 22,000 users (Silverstein, 2019).

The breach could have been prevented by conducting network monitoring. Network monitoring could have helped to monitor the network traffic and devices for threats, vulnerabilities, and suspicious activities. This could have helped to easily prevent the breach before more records were accessed by the cyberattackers. Checking audit reports regularly could have also helped to flag suspicious activity before and during the breach (Gabriel et al., 2018). This could have helped to prevent the breach. Most importantly, immediate action should have been taken after the alert was issued by UpGuard.

The advice that I would have offered to prevent such a breach from occurring in the future would be to train and educate the employees and the users about the need for conducting password changes on a regular basis. I would require policies and procedures to be developed to stipulate password changes at least every three months where the users should not use the same password they had used before (Bhagavatula et al., 2020; Mayer et al., 2021).

Conclusion

In summary, the breach that occurred in the virtualized environment in the case of Facebook had serious repercussions. It led to the exposure of account names, identities, comments to posts, specific reactions to posts, IDs, photos, friends, location check-ins, and even unprotected passwords for about 22,000 users (Susukailo et al., 2022). However, measures such as network monitoring could have helped to prevent the breach.

References

Bhagavatula, S., Bauer, L., & Kapadia, A. (2020). (How) Do people change their passwords after a breach?. arXiv preprint arXiv:2010.09853.

Gabriel, M. H., Noblin, A., Rutherford, A., Walden, A., & Cortelyou-Ward, K. (2018). Data breach locations, types, and associated characteristics among US hospitals. Am J Manag Care, 24(2), 78-84.

Harnal, S., & Chauhan, R. K. (2020). Towards secure, flexible, and efficient role-based hospital's cloud management system. A case study. EAI Endorsed Transactions on Pervasive Health and Technology, 6(23).

Li, B., & Kumar, S. (2022). Managing Software‐as‐a‐Service: Pricing and operations. Production and Operations Management.

Mayer, P., Zou, Y., Schaub, F., & Aviv, A. J. (2021). "Now I'm a bit {angry:}" Individuals' Awareness, Perception, and Responses to Data Breaches that Affected Them. In 30th USENIX Security Symposium (USENIX Security 21) (pp. 393-410).

Rahmani, M. K. I., Shuaib, M., Alam, S., Siddiqui, S. T., Ahmad, S., Bhatia, S., & Mashat, A. (2022). Blockchain-Based Trust Management Framework for Cloud computing-based Internet of Medical Things (IoMT). A Systematic Review. Computational Intelligence and Neuroscience, 2022.

Silverstein, J. (2019, April 4). Hundreds of millions of Facebook user records were exposed on the Amazon cloud server [CBS News]. Retrieved from https://www.cbsnews.com/news/millions-facebook-user-records-exposed-amazon-cloud-server/

Susukailo, V., Opirsky, I., & Yaremko, O. (2022). Methodology of ISMS Establishment against Modern Cybersecurity Threats. In Future Intent-Based Networking (pp. 257-271). Springer, Cham.

Yankson, B. (2022). Social Media Privacy Using EDEE Security Model. In International Conference on Cyber Warfare and Security (Vol. 17, No. 1, pp. 366-374).