Most notable cyberattacks of 2020
2020, being a fresh gangsta year for the people everywhere around the world, has faced many hacks and data breaches additionally. So, here are the five significant hacks that took place in the year.
Twitter account hacked
In July 2020, Twitter was hacked in some heroic ways. Accounts of around 130 big names were hacked, including Barack Obama, Elon Musk, Joe Biden and Bill Gates. The official accounts of these people requested donations in cryptocurrencies from a tweet. The tweet said: “If you send $1,000, I will send you back $2,000 back. Only doing this for 30 minutes.”
When the significant hacks took place, it was the most terrible time phase for the Twitter security members, as the chief executive Jack Dorsey tweeted: “Tough day for us at Twitter. We all feel terrible this happened.”
Around $120,000 of scam took place within an hour.
The U.S. authorities arrested a 17-year-old, Graham Ivan Clark, as being the mastermind of this plan.
According to the officials from Twitter, the attackers targeted the employees through a social engineering scheme. It is a psychological scheme for acquiring sensitive information by tricking the users or the staff members for making cyber mistakes.
Amazon Web Services (AWS) DDoS attack
According to AWS, this was the largest DDoS attack faced by AWS to date.
The Distributed Denial of Service(DDoS) attack, supposed to resist the network/organization usage for users by exceeding the total limit of the server’s threshold. The organization’s server or simply web server cannot handle the traffic more than a desired bandwidth or capacity. If done so, the servers start slowing down, and some of the services are ignored by the organization.
This type of attack costs a lot to recover the servers, decreasing the productivity of that organization.
This attack was a 2.3Tbps DDoS attack, which harmed the Amazon Web Servers.
Zoom Accounts
Zoom was among the most favourite apps for every organization that ran online. According to the stats, the number of daily users crossed 200 million during the covid-19 lockdown. However, the users have raised many issues for the app considering their privacy.
Around half a million accounts on the ZOOM were hacked and sold on the Dark Web. These accounts were sold in less than a rupee and sometimes even for free with IDs’ combinations and passwords. The accounts were of some well-known organizations like Citibank, Chase and others. Around 290 of them were of the colleges and schools.
Eric Yuan, the CEO, said: “We recognize that we have fallen short of the community’s — and our own — privacy and security expectations, for that, I am deeply sorry.”
Marriott Data Leak
It was not the first time that the data of Marriott guests leaked. But this time, the data breach was immense. Data of over 5.2 million were affected due to this breach. The guests’ data include sensitive information like name, e-mail, contact number, and some information about their employees.
According to Marriott, the attack took its path from a franchise hotel that was affiliated with Marriott. Login credentials of 2 staff members were accessed and used for the data breach.
Later on, for the guests, Marriott issued a mailing address which can be used by the guest to check whether their accounts are hacked or not.
NASA
According to NASA, the attempts for phishing attacks took a considerable hike in the crisis. In June 2020, a ransomware gang insisted that they had breached about 2,583 servers of the workstation of Digital Management Inc. resulting in accessing files, employee records and some other information. This also leads to the data breach of the network of NASA IT sector’s contractor. The data of these servers were leaked afterwards.
As we can see the reputed and well-known organization also faces these cyberattacks, so as always, assume the worst-case scenario every time while doing such delicate tasks. For the less known organization, make sure about their privacy policies, or strictly don’t share such sensitive information.
Therefore, it’s imperious that these organizations and other vulnerable firms strengthen their cybersecurity and consider the best practices for their productivity.
It’s not the time to take any eyes off the ball.
You can put your queries in the comment section below, would be glad to answer your questions!
Originally published at https://prakshall.tech.