Beginning of December 2013, US retail Target suffered a huge leak of data: 40 million valid credit card information were sent to Russian servers. This leak will have serious financial impact for Target as there are already more than 90 lawsuits filed against Target.

Target is undergoing deep investigation to understand why this data breach occurred. Recently, an interesting fact popped up. On the 30th November, a sophisticated, commercial, anti-malware system FireEye detected the spreading of an unknown malware within Target’s IT system . It spotted the customized malware that was installing on the point of sales to collect the credit card number before sending them to three compromised Target servers. Target’s security experts based at Bangalore (India) reported it to the US Security Operation Center in Minneapolis. The alert level was the highest from FireEye. The center did not react to this notification. On 2nd December, a new notification was sent without generating any reaction.

The exfiltration of the stolen data started after the 2nd December. Thus, if the Security Operation Center would have reacted to this alert, although it may not have stopped the collection but at least it would have stopped the exfiltration to Russian servers.

As we do not have the details on the daily volume of alerts reported from Bangalore to the Security Operation Center, it is difficult to blame anybody. Nevertheless, this is a good lesson with the conclusions:

• Law 10: Security is not a product but a process. You may have the best tools (and Fire Eye is an extremely sophisticated one. It mirrors the system and runs the input data within the mirror and analysis the reactions in order to detect malicious activities). If you do not manage the feedback and alerts of these tools, and take the proper decision, then these tools are useless. Unfortunately, the rate of false error is too high to let current tools take such decisions
• Law 6: You are the weakest link; The Security Operation Center decided not to react. As FireEye was not yet fully deployed, we may suppose that the operators may not fully trust it. The human decision was wrong this time.