It’s been a bad year for Facebook so far. They recently revealed that they may have improperly shared the details of 87 million users with a third-party, the now-infamous political consulting firm Cambridge Analytica. Then, on Wednesday, Mark Zuckerberg himself admitted during a press conference that “malicious actors” may have took advantage of Facebook to obtain the public data of all or most of Facebook’s 2.2 billion strong user base.
An Post Suffers Data Breach, Leaks Details of 8,000 Customers
An Post has admitted to a data breach which resulted in the data of up to 8,000 customers being provided to a third party without their knowledge or consent. The breach took place between April 2016 and September 2017, and involves the data of customers who used An Post’s online mail redirection service. An Post discovered that it had inadvertently shared these details with a Dublin-based marketing firm, Precision Marketing Information Ltd, who updated users’ details with companies they had previously done business with.
Up to 8,000 customers’ data was sent to a third party marketing company, allowing businesses that had previously contacted them to market to them at their new addresses
Meltdown and Spectre Attacks Expected to Surge in 2018
The world has not seen the last of Meltdown and Spectre, according to a recent report by cyber security and firewall specialists SonicWall. By January 2018, the company had already come across 500 ‘zero day’ malware programs designed to take advantage of various processor vulnerabilities. On Meltdown and Spectre, SonicWall has said, “It’s likely these are just two of many processor vulnerabilities already in play. We predict the emergence of password stealers and infostealers to take advantage of Meltdown and Spectre vulnerabilities”.
Meltdown and Spectre are just two CPU vulnerabilities among many that criminals are expected to continue exploiting throughout 2018 and beyond.
Cyber Report Shows Majority of Paying Ransomware Victims Still Don’t Get Data Back
Have you been hit by ransomware recently? According to a recent survey by CyberEdge, the most reliable approach (by far) to defending against ransomware is proactive rather than reactive. That is to say, having a robust backup and disaster recovery system in place is far more likely to result in minimal disruption and data loss than trying to pay the criminals in the hopes that they do the ‘honourable’ thing and decrypt your critical data. For the report, CyberEdge surveyed IT security professionals and found that more than half (55%) had been hit by ransomware in 2017. The study found that of those who had prepared for ransomware using backups and other business continuity procedures, 86.9% were able to successfully recover their data. However, of those who didn’t have backups to rely on and instead paid the ransom, only 49% actually had their data decrypted and recovered.
Thinking of paying ransomware demands? Think again, as less than half of ransomware payments result in successfully decrytped and restored data.
World’s Largest DDoS Attack Record Broken Twice in a Week
In a worrying new cyber threat trend, the record for largest DDoS (Distributed Denial of Services) attack has been broken, not once, but twice, over the past week. A DDoS attack, in essence, is an attempt to make an online service (such as your business’s website) unavailable by overwhelming it with traffic from various sources. Last week, the coding repository GitHub was briefly taken offline in a 1.3 Terrabits-per-second DDoS attack. This wasn’t entirely unsurprising, as DDoS attacks have been steadily building throughout 2018, but March has definitely been the worst month so far. Now, an unnamed US service provider has reported experiencing an even larger DDoS attack, which hit 1.7 Terrabits-per-second, only a few days after the previous record had been broken. This could pose a significant threat for many businesses that operate memcached database servers, which typically have high-bandwidth access and can be badly impacted by DDoS attacks.
