cybersecurity training

In a hack that was thought to have breached 'only' 6.5 million accounts, LinkedIn discovered four years after the initial breach that the intrusion had been much more severe than expected.

The lesson: Poor encryption and weak security policies were responsible here; issues that could easily be solved be an enterprise organization of that size.

Back in 2009, Heartland Payment Systems was victim to a malware attack that released the credit and debit card information of 130 million users. After this breach, they made a good faith attempt to shore up their security, but unfortunately they became too confident and issued a 'breach warranty' several years after the initial attack in 2015.

Mere months after releasing the promise of a breach warranty, the organization was hacked once again. Another lesson to be learned here is that hackers love a challenge. Don't make yourself a bigger target than you are.

This breach compromised the entirety of the eBay customer database, containing customer email addresses and encrypted passwords. The extent of the hack was due to the nature of it; three corporate level executives had their credentials stolen.

The information held by your C-level executives can often give a hostile actor the keys to the fortress. Your executives must have a higher level of security than the rest of your employees, especially if they frequently access sensitive information.

This hack came about due to weak encryption and cost 150 million users their usernames and email addresses. Under Armour was quick to notify customers of the breach, but not more than a year later the stolen data was offered for sale on the Dark Web.

Many customers and potential clients might have forgotten about the breach a year afterwards, but hackers can release that data at any time they want once they have it causing bad press and angry users.

Deep Root Analytics is a marketing firm that specializes in gathering information to identify audiences for political advertisements. This information is very detailed as you might imagine and included home addresses, birthdays, phone numbers and a number of opinions on hot-button issues like abortion. The data, all 1.1 terabytes on 198 million Americans, was stored on a publicly accessible Amazon server. A class action lawsuit was created as a result, but the depth of a breach like this and its affect on identity theft cannot be understated.

Probably the most disturbing aspect of breaches like these is that you might not have any idea your data was included unless you checked. A stark reminder that the information you might carelessly offer a survey taker could end up in the wrong hands.

Remember MySpace? Well, hackers did, and it looks like they made their breach way back in 2013 but waited to sell the data until later.

If you use an online social media site, you're at risk. Though it isn't likely that statement is going to get you to change your web habits, it's still true - make sure you change your passwords occasionally or someone else might do it for you.

Which hack am I referring to? I don't know, which one do you want?

Social media is a target. Twitter, being one of the largest social networks in existence, is a large target. The lesson here is that sometimes, attacks are unavoidable. If you're a large enough, you can expect that you have the attention of hostile actors. That just means you have to try that much harder to repel them.

A company that claims to be the 'World's largest sex and swinger community' experienced a massive breach compromising the user databases of several sites that they owned. These passwords were either stored in the weak SHA1 algo or were unencrypted as they were easy to access and distribute.

You'd think that a company like this would at least know well enough to 'use protection' with a better encryption algorithm, but there you have it.

A massive attack and one coordinated by another government agency - this is the kind of hack that qualifies less as a breach and more as cyber warfare. Part of a campaign to obtain the data of Americans, this breach included names addresses and passport numbers.

As hacking becomes a more effective tool, we can expect hostile governments to consider using it. This kind of asymmetrical warfare can be costly for the citizens caught in the crossfire.

YAAAAAHHHHOOOOOOO~~~~! was probably what the hackers said when they realized they had obtained the information of half the planet in the biggest hack of all time.

At some point, you cease being angry and start to become a little impressed. Just kidding, you can be both. Don't let a bigger hack happen to you - call iTecs now!