As you can imagine, data, especially internal data like sensitive customer private information, and data security are very important topics today in the business world due to the challenges presented by hackers and the importance of Internet security controls.

Target Corporation had a well-publicized data breach, which eventually cost both the CEO and other members of the Management Team at Target their jobs once information about the nature, timing, and extent of the data breach became public.

Do some research on the Internet regarding Target Corporation's data breach in late 2013.

Please provide an initial and detailed response to one of the questions below; then, read your classmates' responses and respond, substantively, to at least two of your classmates' initial responses to each question. To make sure you cover the Requirements of this Discussion, I suggest you copy and paste the question you decide to research and respond to below into your initial response in bold type. Please do not copy your classmate's responses, there is plenty of information available on this data breach at Target for every student in the class to have an original posting for whichever question you decide to research and answer:

1. In very basic terms, explain to the class how the data breach at Target occurred in the first place. Make sure you provide a Reference to an article in your posting that is hyperlinked so that students can also go to this article and read it, themselves, including the page(s) number(s) in that article where you obtained the information required to develop your posting here.
2. How much did the Target data breach cost the Company in lawsuits, lawsuit settlement costs, etc? Are the lawsuits still ongoing today? Again, make sure you provide hyperlinked references to the article(s) you found in your posting supporting your posting with regards to these costs to Target. End your posting with your estimate of what this data breach has cost Target to date.
3. You should be able to find online or in our library sources in a business periodical including an excellent summary article or two providing you with lots of information on the data breach at Target. Find one of those articles and hyperlink it in your response to this question. After reading the article, what were some of the basic mistakes that Target made that allowed the data breach to get out of control from a management point of view? Be very specific in your response.
4. A continuation of Question 3 above. Finding a similar article, what type of preventative and detective controls (1 of each) could have/should of Target have implemented with regards to managing such a data breach for that particular data breach to not have happened in the first place? Be specific in your answer, please.