The Breach Era
Data breaches became routine and enormous — Target, Sony Pictures, Equifax, MOVEit, Change Healthcare — and the consequences moved from IT departments into congressional hearings, insurance markets and the lives of people who never chose to be customers.
Part of Cybersecurity
14 moments in this segment.
- — First reports of the Target payment card breach. Local news coverage from 19 December 2013, the day the Target breach became public. Early reporting of the intrusion that put card-data theft at retail scale onto the front page.
- — Extended local coverage of the Target breach. A longer WPRI segment on the Target security breach as the story broke, covering what shoppers were being told and what remained unknown. Shows the immediate consumer-facing confusion around a large card breach.
- — Target sets up a hotline for affected shoppers. Coverage of Target's response to the breach, including a hotline for customers who believed their card details had been compromised. A record of corporate incident response as it looked to the public.
- — Sony Pictures Entertainment, Culver City. The Sony Pictures offices in Culver City. In November 2014 the Guardians of Peace, later attributed by the FBI to North Korea, wiped Sony's systems and dumped internal email, salaries and unreleased films. It was the first major breach whose primary weapon was public humiliation rather than theft. The subject dates from 2014; the photograph itself is later.
- — CNN on the Sony Pictures leaks and the studio's damage control. CNN's Pamela Brown reports on the Sony Pictures attack and the executives' attempts at damage control as more internal material was published. Contemporaneous coverage of an incident that redefined what a breach could cost.
- — CBS Evening News on the continuing Sony disclosures. CBS Evening News covers another round of disparaging emails taken from Sony's network, and asks public relations specialists how a company recovers from such an exposure. The breach as a corporate communications crisis.
- — What the Sony Pictures hack was really about. An AJ+ explainer covering the Sony Pictures intrusion beyond the leaked celebrity emails: threats against employees, the pulled release of a film, and the White House treating the incident as a national security matter. The report notes the attribution to North Korea that officials had made.
- — Equifax headquarters, Atlanta. Equifax's Atlanta headquarters. In 2017 an unpatched Apache Struts flaw exposed the personal and credit records of about 147 million people, none of whom had ever chosen to be Equifax customers. The settlement reached roughly 700 million dollars and made 'the data broker you cannot opt out of' a mainstream political problem. The subject dates from 2017; the photograph itself is later.
- — Congressional hearing on the Equifax data breach. The full House Energy and Commerce subcommittee hearing on the Equifax breach, held on 3 October 2017, at which the company's former chief executive was questioned about how the intrusion happened and how consumers were treated afterwards. The complete primary record, over three hours.
- — Maxine Waters questions Equifax at the Financial Services hearing. Ranking member Maxine Waters questions Equifax at the House Financial Services Committee hearing of 5 October 2017, calling the breach and the company's subsequent failures a lapse on a scale not seen before, and noting that affected consumers never chose to do business with Equifax. It frames the credit bureau accountability problem directly.
- — The MOVEit mass exploitation. A breakdown of the MOVEit Transfer zero-day and the scale of the resulting data theft across corporate and government users of the file transfer product. Covers why a single managed file transfer tool exposed so many downstream organisations.
- — PBS NewsHour on the Change Healthcare attack's effect on hospitals. Stephanie Sy interviews Washington Post reporter Dan Diamond about the February 2024 cyberattack on Change Healthcare and the cash-flow crisis it caused for hospitals, doctors and patients. Contemporaneous national coverage of one of the most disruptive incidents ever to hit US healthcare.
- — Local news report on Change Healthcare's outage hitting mental health providers. A KOIN 6 report from the weeks after the February 2024 Change Healthcare attack, following mental health providers in Oregon and California who could not bill or get paid while the claims system was down. It shows the second-order damage of an attack on shared healthcare infrastructure.
- — The CISO Signal on the Change Healthcare breach. A long episode on the February 2024 attack that took down Change Healthcare, the clearing house through which a large share of US medical claims are processed. It explains why an outage in unseen back-office plumbing stopped prescriptions and payments across the country.
