The year 2017 witnessed an inordinate number of Cybersecurity meltdowns and proved that our increasing dependence on online world is making us more and more susceptible to hackers and cyber attacks.
Wanna to know how…? Then here’s the list of top brutal cyber attacks which shook the digital world in 2017.
WannaCry Ransomware Attack- There is enough evidence already that Kim Jong Un led North Korea in association with Russian Intelligence launched a ransomware attack called WannaCry on the computer systems mostly operating in the West. The said malware is said to have targeted public utilities and large corporations the most, notably UK’s NHS and created chaos in global cyberspace by infecting more than 250,000 computers across 150 countries. Since the disrupted number of computers is massive the said cyber attack is topping our list.
Petya/NotPetya- The said cyberattack stands at the second position on our list. As the malware bore the resemblance to the 2016 ransomware Petya which infected many computers around the world, it got the name as said. This dangerous malware hit the US-based pharmaceutical company Merck the most and also hit Danish Shipping company Maersk, Russian Oil giant Rosneft, and FedEx. The Ukraine media specified that the ransomware attack which was launched on June 27th, 2017 targeted most of the computers in its region than any other country. And suspected that Russian Intelligence might have been behind the attack. The ransomware hit Ukraine’s critical infrastructure particularly hard, disrupting utilities like power companies, airports, public transit and the country’s central bank.
Equifax Data Breach- In July this year, a group of cyber crooks succeeded in infiltrating the database of Equifax, touted as one of the credit bureaus of the world. The hackers stole personal data of 145 million US people making it one of the worst incidents in the hacking history. The incident is said to have leaked critical data such as credit card numbers, birth dates and social security numbers making the company drew a lot of flak from different sections of media and politics of United States. This made the company CEO resign immediately.
Wikileaks CIA Vault 7- On March 7th, 2017, Wikileaks published a data trove scrapped from the database of CIA. The post contained content stolen from 8761 documents compiled by CIA containing data related to alleged spying operations and hacking tools. Wikileaks named the data dump as “Vault 7” and followed the initial release with smaller versions of disclosures thereafter.
Federal data Leak of more than 123M US Households- In November this year, critical data of more than 123 million US holds was leaked to a public network- all due to a misconfiguration of a data bucket on AWS. Security company Upguard discovered this vulnerability and reported to Alteryx, Inc, a third-party firm which owned this data on behalf of the federal government of United States. According to sources, almost 100GB of data from the leaked sum belonged to the Army Intelligence Project, codenamed ‘Red Disk’ run secretly by Trump Administration. Reuters reported that if such sensitive data falls into the hands of wrongdoers, then it could spell trouble to White House.
Shadow Brokers- In August 2016, a hackers group called Shadow Brokers claimed to have breached the database of NSA to steal details of a secret NSA program titled ‘Equation Group’. In April 2017, the same group disclosed some secret details discovered by NSA from that program related to a flaw in Windows operating systems. Codenamed as EternalBlue, the data was related to a Windows vulnerability which was later exploited by WannaCry and NotPetya hackers in May and June this year.
Surely there were more such attacks in this year. But the one specified above are those which gained a lot of limelight in the media in this year i.e 2017.
