The year 2019 is soon going to be the past as in a few hours; the world is all set to ring into the year 2020 with a grand celebration. Coming to the cyber world, the year witnessed a lot of cyber attacks on public and private entities and some of the worst cyber attacks of 2019 are listed as below-
Ecuador Cyber Attack- A cyber attack on a database storing personal info of the Ecuadorian populace is said to have leaked sensitive info of more than 20 million populace which includes the data of their respective president Julian Assange- the Wikileaks founder who is now seeking asylum in an Asian nation. News is out that VPNMentor acted as a central hub for the data leak and the leaked info includes details of Ecuadorian National Bank, Ecuadorian Government Registers and a well-known automobile firm.
Data Leak of First American Corporation– Over a three-quarter billion mortgage deal documents in digital form was accessed by hackers when they’ve launched a cyber attack on the database of First American Corporation. And the breached data includes tax records, social security numbers, digital transaction receipts, driver’s license images, and bank account numbers. It is estimated that the hackers could have gained access to more than 885,000,000 files dating back to 2003-2004 and could have copied down the info as the database lacked a proper authentication procedure.
Oklahoma Department of Securities witnessed a breach in the current year as more than a million files related to several FBI investigations were accessed by hackers. According to a resource from UpGuard, the hackers could have breached into storage servers which had data stored on it since 1986. Reports are in that the federal firm failed to secure the data behind an efficient firewall which allowed the hackers to steal records via rsync service.
Trendmicro data breach- Trendmicro which is a Cybersecurity firm was left embarrassed in mid this year when hackers invaded its database to steal names, email addresses, support ticket numbers, and some contact details. And what’s interesting in this whole saga is that the firm came to know about the data breach when some of its customers started to complain about receiving phony calls from people claiming to be employees of Trend Micro. Prima Facie revealed that the hacker/the hacking group might have sold the details to the 3rd party and so tracking the culprits has become tedious.
Flipboard cyber attack- This year, news aggregating online website Flipboard experienced two cyber attacks. The first one was identified at the end of March’19 when the IT staff of the web services provider identified a data breach which took place between June 2nd, 2018 to March 23, 2019. The second attack took place between April 21st, 2019 and ended on April 22nd, 2019. As the news app was serving over 150,000,000 users, Flipboard estimates that the data breach could have impacted almost all its users. Later some noted media resources reported that Flipboard’s data breach where names, email addresses, and user names were leaked happened because the company used weak encryption algorithms while protecting user data.
Facebook data breach- The year 2019 proved embarrassing to the social media giant Facebook as the company hit the news headlines for having more than 540 million of its records leaked to hackers. Later on, a probe launched by Mark Zuckerberg’s company said that the information leak took place after a server related to Cultura Colectiva’s app was infiltrated by sophisticated hackers.
Fortnite app data breach– Popular gaming app Fortnite admitted that vulnerability in its website could have allowed hackers to take over any account and eavesdrop on a player’s activity with ease. The gaming website said that the vulnerability could have impacted over 200,000,000 accounts where the in-game currency holding was also found to be at threat.
