A Review on Cyber Security Attacks in Recent Years
By: Vidhi Raghvani
Tags: Data Breach, Cyber Forensics, Network Security, Hacking, Cyber Security Services

Infringement of data (also known as Data Breaching) is an act of disseminating extremely sensitive data that is meant to be kept confidential, Disclosure of data to an unsecured environment, either with a purpose or accidentally.

There are various forms of data breaches, including phishing, ransomware attacks, cyber trespassing and exfiltration. This blog would show a study on various cybersecurity breaches that have occurred in the past decade.

WANNACRY (2017)

On May 12, 2017, the world witnessed the first worming ransomware in the history of the internet. Earlier most of the attacks were on banks or end-users but with WannaCry the attackers could victimize the users directly, owing to cryptocurrency.

WannaCry — ransomware that made computers across the globe no good. WannaCry hit more than 200,000 organizations from over 150 countries, shutting down everything and affecting 47 NHS trusts in the United Kingdom. It affects other computers via a Server Message Block (SMB) remote code execution vulnerability in Microsoft Windows computers. This stunt is named Eternal Blue. This worm sealed all the data on the computer and displayed a message demanding a ransom in exchange to unfreeze the data and that the payment amount will be doubled after three days and the files will be deleted if payment is not made after seven days.

Ransomware is a malicious software program that encrypts all data in a computer and blocks access to them. Often, this malware simulates as an email attachment or a legitimate website link tricking users to open it. Once this file is opened, it attacks the hard drive and encrypts all the files. A ransom is demanded decrypting the files and if the user doesn’t pay, the files will be deleted.

WannaCry ransomware demanded $300 worth of the crypto-currency Bitcoin to decrypt the files of the affected computers. The payment was demanded in bitcoins as it is unfeasible to trace. Though $300 might look like a considerate amount, multiplied by 300,000(the approximate number of computers affected by WannaCry), the amount becomes huge. Businesses affected by WannaCry were European manufacturing plants of automotive giants Nissan, Healthcare sectors, Hospitals in the UK like London’s Bart Health NHS Trust. All patients’ records and doctors’ files are claimed to be unaffected by WannaCry.

Marcus Hutchins, a cybersecurity analyst, analyzed the code used by the worm and found that it referenced a website URL that didn’t exist. He acquired the domain for $10 and forwarded it to a sinkhole server where it couldn’t do any harm and hence disabled the code. Though this inventive way out may have saved the day, this is certainly not the termination of ransomware attacks.

SONY PICTURES HACK (2014)

“We’ve been hacked.” These are the dreaded terms that no executive wants to hear. But this is exactly how the co-chairman of Sony Pictures Entertainment, began on Monday morning when the company announced that its entire computer system had been breached by an organization called Guardians of Peace. It was one of the largest attacks in 2014.

The phishing scam at Sony Pictures Entertainment happened in the month of November 2014 that disclosed substantially more personal information than the company predicted. This was instigated by the movie titled ‘The Interview’, which was a comedy about North Korean leader Kim Jong-un and a ploy to gun him down. This attack revealed humiliating emails and personal information and secrets about some of the world’s immensely popular celebrities. They claim to have stolen a vast mass of data from Sony Pictures and as large as 100 terabytes of data. An anonymous group called Guardians of Peace (GOP) professed that they caused the attack, and according to Reuters, it was suspected that a North Korean spokesman called the movie an act of terrorism.

The hackers revealed and leaked online information containing salaries, social security numbers, movies, passwords, usernames and other personal sensitive information about Sony’s network architecture and a ton of documents that leaked personally identifiable information of the employees and their business partners and due to this the company lost over $100 million.

A majority of the affected users were left vulnerable to attacks like ransomware and phishing. The employees were the most affected since most of their personal and sensitive information was exposed to the outside world. There were also a significant amount of unreleased movies that were leaked which caused the company to lose a lot of money.

Sony Pictures Entertainment had insufficient malware defences at the time and due to this, there were poor incident response and data protection systems.

CELEBRITY IDENTITY THEFTS (2010)

Identity theft is a criminal offence in which someone uses a person’s personal information like their name, identification number, credit or debit card without their permission for unauthorized transactions, purchases and fraud. Identity theft with respect to cybercrime happens when a hacker steals the online identity of a person like a bank account and card details. Identity theft is the basis for all the other cyber crimes like phishing, ransomware attacks, malicious software, etc.

Let us understand more about identity theft with the help of a real identity theft case. On August 19, 2010, Maria Gabriella owner of Beverly Hill Salon was arrested for being accused of an identity theft crime. Maria stole credit card information from her A-list clients and ran up to $300,000 in fraudulent charges. U.S. Secret Service police arrested Maria Gabriella Perez outside the incident at her business, Chez Gabriela Studio on North La Peer Drive. Perez, 51, faced two counts of felony criminal mischief and a charge of up to 25 years in prison.

An affidavit in support of the criminal complaint alleges that Perez committed illegal crimes amounting to $ 68,000 on credit card designer Loree Rodkin. Most of the penalties were laid at Chez Gabriela Studio. Other alleged victims named in the affidavit include Jennifer Aniston, Anne Hathaway, Liv Tyler, Melanie Griffith, Cher and Speedman.

GLOBAL BANKS HACK (2015)

Cyber-trespassing involves unauthorized access of computer systems that do not belong to the individual, i.e., hacking into secure systems.

In the year 2015, a group of Russian-based hackers managed to get access from over 100 institutions throughout the world and hacked the global banks for £650 million. The cyber trespassing scam at the global banks helped to gain access to secure and private information by making use of malware to infiltrate banks’ systems and helped them garner personal data.

This group was able to imitate online bank staff to sanction fraudulent transfers. They even managed to order the ATM machines to apportion the cash even without the use of the bank card. Using this malware the cybercriminals hacked the global banks and had access to personal data illegally and stole terabytes of personal information.

It was approximated that around £650 million was stolen from the financial institutions in total.