Cs 2950-v (f'16) Lecture 1: Overview Contents

Data breaches. This is well-illustrated by the constant occurrence of data breaches. In 2016, the Democratic National Committee (DNC) was hacked and in July Wikileaks published 19, 252 emails and 8, 034 attachments from the DNC. This led to the resignation of DNC chair Debbie Wasserman-Schultz [18]. Recently, 191M voter records were leaked online including voter names, addresses and party affiliations [14]. In 2015, 104K tax records were stolen from the IRS [13]. In 2014, the office of personnel management (OPM) was hacked and the records of government employees including the personal files of employees seeking top secret clearance were stolen [17]. The records of the latter included information about their past activities, their families and friends. In 2015, Ashley Madison—a website that facilitates extra-marital affairs—lost the personal records of each of 37M users. The breach has resulted in numerous divorces, political scandals and even suicides. These are just a few examples of recent high-profile data breaches but there are many more including from banks, tech companies, retail companies, government agencies from all around the world.