Hackers are now determined more than ever. They aim to steal your data. Moreover, they use every way possible. Some are even unimaginable. In this article, we’ll see two of the top cybersecurity attacks 2019. These involved comms giants WhatsApp and Facebook.
2019: A Year Full Of Cyber Attacks
As technology increases, so as the number of cyberattacks. Likewise, they have become a huge problem for businesses. Moreover, it doesn’t matter to hackers if your business is small.
As we have mentioned earlier, cyberattacks increase not only in frequency but also the sophistication of methods. It is getting worse every single day. 2019 witnessed a surge in cyber attacks.
For example, let’s look at NDIA’s 2019 Cybersecurity Report. According to the report, 44% of organizations with more than 500 employees have experienced a cyber attack.
Let’s look at another source – Forbes. According to its report, the leak exposed 4.1 billion records. Those were in 2019 alone. As a matter of fact, 54% more cyber attacks were experienced in 2019 in comparison to the first six months of 2018.
In this article, you are going to read two of top cybersecurity attacks 2019.
Facebook User Data Leak
This attack happened on April 3rd, 2019. The attack compromised 540 million records of Facebook users. Moreover, the records were published on Amazon’s cloud computing service.
The first leak involved Cultura Collectiva. It is a digital platform based in Mexico. Notably, they openly stored 540 million records of Facebook records. That amounts to approximately 146 GB of records. Moreover, those records include identification numbers and account names. The records were openly accessible and can be downloaded by anyone.
The second leak involved “At The Pool”’s back-up. “At The Pool” is a Facebook-integrated application. Amazon S3 bucket exposed the data to the public internet. The data consisted of users’ friend lists, likes, passwords, and more. These passwords were likely for the “At the Pool” app rather than the Facebook account of the user.
Facebook and Amazon worked together to remove both sets of data.
This is one of the top cybersecurity attacks 2019. Also, it was sophisticated. This happened on May 14th, 2019. Hackers exploited the company’s communication system. It was to send malware to mobile devices of several users.
According to the Guardian, this attack affected 1.5 billion users. Furthermore, it also stated that the hack was a ‘serious rights violation.’
WhatsApp attributed the attack to an Israeli spyware company called NSO group. Pegasus is the name of NSO’s flagship program. It can collect intimate and sensitive data from a target device. Moreover, the program can obtain data from the device’s location, microphone, and location.
In October 2019, WhatsApp filed a lawsuit against the NSO in a Californian court. Furthermore, the complaint described the alleged attacks as an “unmistakable pattern of abuse” that violated US law.
NSO responded that “NSO would not be involved in the operating or identifying of targets of its technology, which is solely operated by intelligence and law enforcement agencies.” Moreover, the group said that “it will contest in the strongest possible terms”.
Want to know more about cybersecurity attacks 2019? Please watch the video below.
