Hackers are more determined than ever in stealing data. They use every way possible. Take a look at the worst cybersecurity breaches 2019.
2019: A Year Full Of Cybersecurity Breaches
Indeed, technology gets smarter every day. It increases both in number and convenience. Yet, cyberattacks also increase in number and sophistication. This presents a huge problem to businesses. Moreover, hackers don’t mind if your business is huge or small. As long as you have data, you are a target.
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, hackers exposed 4.1 billion records. Those were in 2019 alone. As a matter of fact, 2019 witnessed 54% more cyber attacks in comparison to the first six months of 2018.
In this article, you are going to read two of the worst cybersecurity breaches 2019.
This is one of the worst cybersecurity breaches 2019. Hackers use complex methods to exploit the company’s communication system. Afterward, cybercriminals sent malware to mobile devices to a number of users. The WhatsApp data breached occurred on the 14 of May 2019.
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 has the ability to 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. The complaint described the alleged attacks as an “unmistakable pattern of abuse” that violated the 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”.
Facebook User Data Leak
This attack happened on April 3rd, 2019. Hackers 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. Furthermore, anyone may download the compromised records.
The second leak involved “At The Pool”’s back-up. “At The Pool” is a Facebook-integrated application. The data was exposed to the public internet via an Amazon S3 bucket. The data consisted of users’ friend list, 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.
