Timehop Data Breach
Introduction
World over, corporations and organizations are subject to the events that occur within or without their environment and more often than not, they have to change their operational processes to prevent an adverse influence of the said event on their efficiencies regarding service or quality of the same. In the contemporary world, the games that are most likely to disrupt organizational processes are limited, and one of such is information technology through cybersecurity breaches. When the security system of an organization is breached, the most vulnerable resource is information given that intellectual property has become one of the most valuable treasures in the world currently and that could explain the unprecedented rise in cyber hacks and heists over the last couple of years. The fact that it is highly targeted therefore means that a continuity plan is necessary to mitigate the effects of interruptions in forms of breaches as is a disaster management plan.
In the past two years or so, some common hack schemes have been subjected not only to organizations but nations and institutions as well. In the year 2018 alone, over 20 major data breaches have been recorded with the accumulated affected people numbering over tens of millions. One such organization that has experienced the wrath of attackers is Timehop, a Facebook allied app that reminds users of Facebook of posts from their past. The hack at Timehop affected a massive twenty-one a million users of the app and the effect was felt mainly through the exposure of the posts made by the users some of which were private. Apart from the positions, names and email addresses associated with the posts were stolen as were the tokens that could be applied in viewing posts from Facebook, Twitter and Instagram accounts. The most damaging effect was the attached phone numbers that exposed some users’ phone lines (about 4.7 million) and the ability to control the app for a little over two hours, the timeline of the attack as provided for by the company.
Timehop’s organizational structure and the business processes
The fact that the company is a technology-based one is in no question given that its application rests on social media platforms and the service offered is a reminder of post on the various social media avenues mainly Facebook and Twitter. Most importantly, the app is driven by an objective to recreate links among friends that had either been separated or lost touch. Running on a platform of nostalgia, it reminds users of the old posts that one made with friends or family in it and hopefully, the reminder rekindles the feelings that came with the picture involved. Aside from the objectives, the company comprises of a structured hierarchy with managing executives, directors and all unlike the perceptions that people have for small enterprises as itself as unstructured. Moreover, information storage is crucial especially if involving users and or clients and the organization uses cloud storage as its primary memory host.
The application is available in both Android and iOS versions and boasts of about a million downloads today from the App stores in which it is situated. Founded in 2010, the company has received total funding of approximately eighteen million dollars and had the last financing came in four years ago. Most notably, big-name investors such as Mark Zuckerberg and Sparks are some of the listed investors for the Appstore, and its establishment is attributed to Jonathan Wegener and Bonny Wong who were the founders of the app. To aid its operations of digging and distributing pictures taken from the past, the company has staffers to do most of the work, but unlike most organizations, it lacks a marketing or advertisement team hence most of its operations are technical and so are its business processes.
Impact analysis
The organization runs reasonably well save for the storage aspect which has been demonstrated by the hack to be insufficient in the form of security involvement. From the information breached, the private information of most users though not very damaging has been compromised. Unfortunately, the data lost mirrors about a four million loss in information that could prove vital, phone numbers, which links most Americans to almost all their service providers including banks and postage along with private details. The point of concern as far as storage is concerned is the security system applied particularly in regards to the authentication strategies explicitly utilized in passwords. The stem of the breach was traced back to the absence of a multilayered password system a standard security feature in the most contemporary organization today. Also, the lack of modularity in the storage process ensured that all the information that the system had was stored in a single database, a factor which mainly increased the damage done to the exposure of the database.
For continuity purposes, the app will have to reinstate its previous reputation and therefore must make things right for the customers. First of all, a reinstallation of the security apparatus is necessary for preventing any additional breaches, but that is inadequate. They also have to come up with a new strategy on disaster recovery to ensure that in the case of a violation, the attackers can only last in the system for much less time an example of a get and get away job, the information they get must be rendered useless to their needs through let’s say, encryption.
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