Boston, Massachusetts – In the past, when you thought of criminals, what came to mind were pirates with hooks; gangsters with revolvers; street thieves with knives, but today, the biggest criminals are hackers. They can even look like high school students or people in suits behind a computer who put in check very powerful companies like Facebook, or entire governments, like
Ransomware attacks are increasing every year. The study “The cost of Data Breach”, prepared by IBM, revealed that, on average, in 2020 this type of attack cost companies 3.86 million dollars. A year later, it was up 12.7% to $4.24 million. By 2022, this type of attack reached an all-time high in the first quarter at $4.25 million, an increase of 2.6% from last year.
Gabriel Catropa, CTO of security in LATAM for IBM, shared: “Today, a large part of the impacts is due to having very low security components. You have to have a secure infrastructure, part vulnerability management, part cloud components (…) protecting an entire company is not possible. But the least you have to do is have the mentality of the ‘crown jewels’ to protect and the most relevant perimeters”.
The reality is that no company is exempt from being cyberattacked, however small or large it may be. Even some of the largest and most powerful companies and governments have suffered security vulnerabilities that cost the data of millions of their users. We leave you some of the most important attacks of the last three years:
In March 2021, the personal details of 533 million users were posted on a hacker forum. The information included user data from 106 different countries, of which 32 million users were from the US, 11 million from the UK and 6 million from India.
The information included phone numbers, Facebook ID credentials, full names, locations, birthdays, biographies, and in some cases emails.
A Facebook spokesperson that the data leak occurred due to a vulnerability that the company ignored in 2019.
shanghai police
In July this year, the database of the Shanghai National Police (SHGA) was leaked. This database contains many terabytes of information on millions of Chinese citizens.
names, addresses, places of birth, identification number, telephone number and crime record. The criminal, identified as HackerDan, offered to sell this information for 10 bitcoins.
experience
In February 2021, the Brazilian company suffered a leak of 220 million data from its users. Among the personal information violated were photographs, social security information and even vehicle registration.
This leak represented a 2% drop in the brand’s shares.
Syniverse
In September 2021, the telecommunications company that provides services to AT&T, T-mobile and Verizon revealed that hackers had access to its systems for years. This impacted more than 200 customers and millions of cell phones around the world.
, an “unknown individual or organization gained unauthorized access to databases within your network on several occasions and that login information allowing access to or from your electronic database transfer environment was seen engaged”
Among the information were records of phone calls and text messages, as well as indirect access to hundreds of accounts protected with 2-factor authentication.
Canvas
Australian graphic design platform 139 million users as of May 2019.
Among the compromised information was the username of the clients, real names, emails, information about the country and city of residence and the passwords of 61 million users.
Google tokens were also found for some users so that users could sign in without entering a password. This was a problem since of the 139 million users, 78 million had their gmail accounts associated with Canva.
