The year 2020 has turned out to be a boon for cybercriminals as they were seen targeting remote workers who are working from home with a wide range of cyberattacks.
A recent report released by the Russian Cybersecurity firm Kaspersky says that there have been around 726 million cyber attacks so far and the estimates say that the current year could rake up at least 1.5 billion cyber incidents by this year’s end.
Moving forward and putting aside what is going to happen in the future, let’s discuss a bit about the biggest data breaches that happened this year so far.
A report by Security Intelligence says that the average expenditure of the data breach is now $3.92 million, with the most costly part of the process being information recovery. The report also highlighted a few of the biggest data breaches that have happened so far in this year and the list is as follows-
Twitter wins the title as the world’s second social media giant was in news for becoming a victim of the highest-profile data breach. In July this year, a massive hack took place on the servers of Twitter where the cyber crooks took control of the few of the noted accounts like Elon Musk, Joe Biden, Jeff Bezos, Kim Kardashian, and Bill Gates to promote Bitcoins payments towards charity. Twitter confirmed the cyber attacks and claimed it as a highly sophisticated social engineering attack. Later on, a detailed probe found that over 130,000 accounts of high profile celebrities were targeted in the attack, and around $120,000 in donations was gathered by hackers.
Zoom- Like many of the companies ordered their employees to work from home since March 2020- to curb the spread of the COVID 19, Zoom Video Conferencing app witnessed a high spike in its user database. But in April 2020, reports emerged that Zoom’s database was hit by a hack where 500,000 user credentials were leaked onto the dark web. Hackers then started to sell login details that enabled the cyber criminal’s join the meeting conversations midstream. Later Zoom apologized to its users about the hack and appointed new CEO to take over the company reigns and made it official that all its meetings will from now be highly encrypted.
Marriot Hotel Data Breach– In March 2020, Marriot Hotel admitted that the information of more than 5.2 million of its hotel guests was compromised in a cyberattack and that includes sensitive details like contact information like phone number, and mailing address along with email ID. Loyalty account details, personal details like gender and DoB, hotel room preferences and history of stay, and airline loyalty details if any. It was revealed in the later probe that the details were hacked from servers after two of the senior staff of Marriot was hit by a phishing attack.
Easy Jet- In a shocking revelation made in July this year, UK airliner Easy Jet stated that cybercriminals stole data records of more than 9 million of its customers and some credit card details through a cyber attack. And as the company failed to protect the info of its customers, it was slapped with a penalty of $23 billion by a law firm PGMBM via a class action lawsuit.
