Year 2017 is marked as the year of doom for cybersecurity specialists. This year, some of the major infrastructures in the corporate world of Unites States of America got struck with dreadful blows. Officials were left in bewilderment and disbelief when the latest news floated regarding Accenture’s incapability to establish the baseline security level for the protection of sensitive cloud information.
We wish Accenture would’ve been the only one but the list goes on forever. Some of the most reliable names such as Verizon, Deloitte and Dow Jones are also equally responsible to show failures in combating their way around cybersecurity breaches. Now we all know about the S3 breach at Amazon in Australia and with the RedLock CSI reports coming in, the lock on marks more than 53% of the businesses as exposed within the cloud infrastructure controlled by AWS.
With so much security issues emerging around the world these days, we often find ourselves asking the exact same question! Can we term ourselves as safe?
Here are the ten major slip ups, which the cloud infrastructure observed in last year. Let’s hope our security officials can learn something better from their past mistakes:
1. Verizon Massive Data Exposure
Verizon failed to secure their customer information. Millions worth of data (approximately 14 million records of subscribers) were leaked on an Amazon S3 storage server. This information was leaked by a third party service working with Verizon.
2. The Downfall of EquiFax
One of the mother lode of all hacks was the downfall of Equifax. The company lost sensitive credit card information for more than 143 million people in a single phishing incident. According to security officials, the security tool malfunctioned to protect the website.
3. Even the Dark Web Wasn’t Safe
Freedom Hosting, particularly known for hosting a large number of dark web domains got hacked in February obtaining almost a 1/5th of dark web information. The hacker did not share the information due to the obscene nature of content.
4. NSA Breached 5th Time In Year
It is shameful to address that the NSA itself suffered a hit and lost 100 Gigabytes worth of military information available under file name “Red Disk.” The cybersecurity threat further revealed another surveillance program called Ragtime in process.
5. Bell Canada’s Fund Shortage
One of the largest telecommunication service Bell Canada lost customer information of 1.9 million people and further failed to pay the hacker the ransom amount. As a result, some information was leaked on the Internet giving Bell Canada “The Blow.”
6. Uber Lost a Security Chief Along With Information
Uber lost information worth of 57 million users, somehow the data leak was covered up by the security chief. However, upon learning this issue, the Uber board of Directors sacked the guy from his position.
7. Virtual Keyboards are Also Unreliable
Virtual Keyboard ai.type also resulted in losing information of more than 31 million people through its geolocation option. Since when do virtual keyboards need to know about our locations?
8. Password Managers Require A Better Class of Security
OneLogin, one of the leading password managers got hacked earlier this May and resulted in losing their ability to decrypt information on its password loggers.
9. Beware the Malware in Universities
SQL Injections infiltrated more than 60 different universities including US federal government organizations. All thanks to the hacker known as the famous Rasputin.
10. The Only Good Thing That Happened
Threats on iCloud to wipe out major information turned out to be a failed extortion. The threats were based on prior records which hackers believed was iCloud customer information.