Top Data Breach (Prt2)

1-GoDaddy Data Breach Exposes Over 1 Million WordPress Customers’ Data

Web hosting giant GoDaddy on Monday disclosed a data breach that resulted in the unauthorized access of data belonging to a total of 1.2 million active and inactive customers, making it the third security incident to come to light since 2018.

In a filing with the U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission (SEC), the world’s largest domain registrar said that a malicious third-party managed to gain access to its Managed WordPress hosting environment on September 6 with the help of a compromised password, using it to obtain sensitive information pertaining to its customers. It’s not immediately clear if the compromised password was secured with two-factor authentication. The Arizona-based company claims over 20 million customers, with more than 82 million domain names registered using its services

GoDaddy revealed it discovered the break-in on November 17. An investigation into the incident is ongoing and the company said it’s “contacting all impacted customers directly with specific details.” The following information is believed to have been accessed by the intruder —

• Email addresses and customer numbers of up to 1.2 million active and inactive Managed WordPress customers
• Original WordPress Admin password that was set at the time of provisioning was exposed
• sFTP and database usernames and passwords associated with its active customers, and
• SSL private keys for a subset of active customers

While data breaches are no longer a sporadic occurrence, the exposure of email addresses and passwords presents risk of phishing attacks, not to mention enable the attackers to breach the vulnerable WordPress sites to upload malware and access other personally identifiable information stored in them.

2-Adobe Gets Hacked; Hackers Steal 2.9 million Adobe Customers accounts

In 2013 Hackers broke into Adobe Systems’ internal network on Thursday, stealing personal information on 2.9 million customers and the source code for several of Adobe’s most popular products. This an absolutely massive blow to Adobe, especially their reputation. Adobe, which makes Photoshop and other programs, revealed that cyber attackers had access user information, including account IDs and encrypted passwords as well as credit and debit card numbers

In November, 2012 – An Egyptian Hacker named ViruS_HimA also hacked into Adobe servers and leaked private data of 150,000 emails and hashed passwords of Adobe employees and customers/partner of the firm such as the US Military, USAF, Google, NASA DHL and many other companies

3-Yahoo ( 2013)

Yahoo deserves the first mention because of the sheer size of its breach and the damaging effect it had on the company’s ability to compete as an email and search engine platform.

In 2013, all three billion of Yahoo’s accounts were compromised, making the breach the largest in the history of the internet. It took the company three years to notify the public that everyone’s names, email addresses, passwords, birth dates, phone numbers and security answers had been sold on the Dark Web by hackers.

It was later confirmed by American security agencies that the attack was perpetrated by a group affiliated with the Russian government. While looking into the 2015 attack, Yahoo officials realized more than one billion accounts had been exposed in the breach.

The company then admitted in 2017 that all of its accounts had been breached. Verizon removed nearly $400 million from the buying price and signed an intricate deal that allowed both companies to share the financial liabilities associated with the breach.

4-Marriott Hotels ( 2018)

The Marriott Hotel breach was massive both because of the amount of data exposed and the sensitivity of the information accessed.

According to The Washington Post, hackers breached the reservation systems of Starwood Hotels, which was bought by Marriott in 2016 for $13.6 billion. The cybercriminals behind the attack had an astounding four years to move within the Starwood system, which includes the Sheraton, Westin, W Hotels, St. Regis, Four Points, Aloft, Le Méridien, Tribute, Design Hotels, Element, and the Luxury Collection.

Hackers gained access to the names, credit cards, addresses and passport numbers of millions of people who stayed at the hotels between 2014 and 2018.

At first, Marriott said the number of people affected was 500 million but revised that number down to 383 million