Cyber attacks became something of a hot topic of 2016 and that’s due to the fact that they not only have the potential to break a business on a financial note ( ex- Verizon deal of buying yahoo) but also can bring in a kind of political instability into a nation’s current affairs. For instance, US accused Russia of influencing US Polls 2016 in favor of Donald Trump).
Thus, the only way to save a company or a nation from an individual or state-sponsored cyber attacks is to first learn what is going on and then educate ourselves on how to stay away from such attacks in future.
So, going further with the first step of educating ourselves on cyber attacks, here’s a list five of the major attacks which took place in 2016.
February 2016- The month witnessed a major cyber attack exposing some critical details of more than 10K DHS and 20K FBI employees. Fancy Bear which is a Russian government funded cyber army is said to have launched this attack and the method of launching it still remains a mystery.
June 2016- The said month witnessed a series of a data breach on many websites related to social media. Around 500 million passwords were stolen in this attack and the data was put for sale on a dark web store by a hacker named PEACE. The hacker succeeded in stealing over 167 million LinkedIn passwords, 360 million MySpace passwords, 68 Million Tumbler passwords, 100 million VK.com passwords, and 71 million Twitter passwords.
June 2016– The same month details of another cyber attack came into light. It was revealed after a probe of CIA, that two cyber criminal groups from Russia-Tsar team and fancy bear were responsible for launching cyber attacks on the database of Democratic National Convention. For some reasons, the impact of the attack and the aftermath were kept as a secret to the media by former US President Barack Obama’s government.
June & December 2016- Yahoo revealed to the world that its database has become a victim of a cyber attack in early 2016 and as a result of the attack; details of more than 500 million user accounts were leaked to the dark web by hackers in June and December’16. The data includes user names, mail addresses, and date of births, passwords, phone numbers, and security questions. The attack showed its impact of Verizon’s plans to buy Yahoo web services for $4 billion. In January 2017, Yahoo disclosed to Verizon through various media resources that it was ready to give a discount of $1.5 billion if the latter is ready to acquire the former without any further conditions.
September 2016- A domain name service provider named DYN was it by a cyber attack in the said month and as a result, website services of Twitter, Netflix, PayPal, Pininterst, and the Playstation were affected severely. The attack was launched in the form of DDOS and North Korean hackers were accused of being behind this mischief.
Do you know about more such incidents which took place in 2016? Then tell us about them via the comments section below.
