With the spate of cyber breaches and resulting data and intellectual property theft over the past few years, cybersecurity is now the foremost agenda on most cyber fora today.
It has proven almost impossible to completely erode incidences of cyber breaches. This is because hackers always adapt, and often times, find ways around even the strongest of firewalls.
Cyber attacks typically take the form of one or more of the following; ransomware, spyware, adware, or, malware attacks. In simpler terms, cyber breaches are perpetrated by acts of viruses, worms and/or Trojan attacks.
This article brings you a compilation of 5 notable cyber breaches that took place in 2020.
Top 5 Cyber Breaches in 2020
1. Twitter Hack
First on our list of top cyber breaches in 2020 is the Twitter Hack.
This is, perhaps, one of the most notable cyber breaches in recent times. And it is, in fact, the most recent breach experienced by the micro-blogging platform. The attack took place in mid-July 2020 – targeted at the accounts of several high-profile individuals, including the former US President, Barack Obama.
On Wednesday, 16 July 2020, hackers took control of verified Twitter accounts owned by Barack Obama, Bill Gates, Warren Buffett, Joe Biden, Elon Musk, Kanye West and Kim Kardashian-West among others.
Luckily, Twitter restored the accounts within hours, and issued a statement confirming the attack; stating about eight accounts belonging to high profile individuals were compromised.
Although Twitter did not attribute any direct monetary loss to this attack, there were unverified claims made by users’ who were allegedly defrauded by the attackers during the breach.
This would very well go down in history as one of most notable cyber breaches experienced by Twitter.
2. Travelex Ransomware Attack
On December 31, 2019, Travelex, a foreign exchange company, was at the receiving end of a cyber-attack. The attack compelled Travelex to shut down its global operations in order to foil the attack and protect critical data.
A notorious gang of hackers, later identified as asSodinokibi, claimed responsibility for the attack. And demanded $6m as ransom, to restore over 5GB of customer data allegedly stolen from Travelex database during the breach.
The cyber attack affected a good number of UK banks and millions of customers, who relied on Travelex for their foreign exchange services.
3. Lloyd, Halifax, and Bank of Scotland System Outage
Another notable cyber-attack was the system outage experienced by Lloyds, Halifax, and Bank of Scotland.
On January 11, 2020, a system outage rendered over 20 million customer accounts inaccessible. This restrained the customers’ access to their accounts, which is normally accessible through the bank’s mobile apps and online platforms. Fortunately, the attack lasted for only a few hours.
Interestingly, after the system was restored, the attack was rebutted by the entity; who alleged that the outage was due to internal system failure, and thus not attributable to a cyber-attack. True or false? We may never know the entire story, but the incident has been considered one of the notable cyber breaches in 2020.
4. The Robinhood Stock Trading Outage
On March 2, 2020, US-based stock trading app, Robinhood Stock, valued at $7.6billion. experienced a major outage that hindered trading for several hours. The incident affected over 10million users, who could not gain access to trading app during the outage.
The trading company issued a statement admitting the incident, while indicating that they were working to restore services on the app. The app was eventually restored after a few hours.
5. Finastra Ransomware Attack
Last on our list of top cyber breaches of 2020 is the ransomware attack on Finastra, a prominent FinTech coy. The attack was confirmed via a statement issued by the London-based company.
The entity’s servers were later restored hours after the attack.
Conclusion
According to a security report, there has been an exponential increase in cyber breaches and data theft in the past three years. Records shows that millions of databases are being breached annually, resulting in the theft of billions of data and user records.
Hence, this article is a wake-up call to major stakeholders in the cyber-world on the need for more aggressive approaches to curb the menace of cyber breaches, while putting in place more stringent measures to secure user data retained on proprietary platforms.
