History of data breaches
Data breaches have been increasingly common and harmful for decades. However, a few stand out as instructive examples of how the breach has evolved, how an attacker can orchestrate these attacks, what can be stolen, and what happens to the data. after the violation has occurred.
Leaks of digital data began long before the Internet was widely used, yet they have many similarities with the leaks we see today. An early landmark incident occurred in 1984, when credit reporting agency TRW Information Systems (now Experian) realized that one of their database files had been compromised. This archive is cryptographically protected, which someone took from an administrative note at a Sears store and posted it on an “electronic bulletin board” – a rudimentary type of Google Doc that anyone can access. access and change using their landline connection. From there, anyone who knows how to view the bulletin board can use the password to access the data stored in the TRW file: the personal data and credit history of 90 million Americans. The password has been exposed for a month. At the time, TRW said it changed the database password as soon as it discovered the situation. Although the case was overshadowed by last year’s breach of credit reporting agency Equifax (discussed below), the TRW blunder is a warning to data companies everywhere — one that Many people clearly didn’t notice.
Large-scale breaches like the TRW crash happen infrequently as the years go by and the internet matures. In the early 2010s, as mobile devices and the Internet of Things greatly expanded connectivity, the problem of data breaches became especially acute. Stealing username/password pairs or credit card numbers—even breaching a trove of data compiled from publicly available sources—could provide an attacker with the key to unlocking an entire life online. someone’s. And some specific breaches have helped fuel a growing dark web economy based on stolen user data.
One of these incidents was the 2012 LinkedIn breach it seemed at first exposed 6.5 million passwords. The data was cryptographically hashed or scrambled, as a safeguard that made the data difficult to understand and therefore difficult to reuse, but hackers quickly began to “crack” the hash functions to save money. reveal the real password of LinkedIn users. While LinkedIn itself has taken precautions to reset the passwords of affected accounts, attackers still benefited from them by finding other accounts on the web where users had reuse the same password. That’s too common Loose password hygiene which means a single breach can haunt users for years.
The LinkedIn hack is even worse than it first appeared. In 2016, a hacker called “Peace” start selling account information, especially email addresses and passwords, from 117 million LinkedIn users. Since then, the data stolen from the LinkedIn breach has been reused and resold by criminals, and attackers still successfully mine the data to this day, as so many people reuse it. same password on multiple accounts over the years.
However, the data breach didn’t really become food for the table, until late 2013 and 2014, when major retailers Target, Neiman Marcus, and Home Depot suffered major breaches, respectively. The target hack, which was first publicly disclosed in December 2013, impacted the personal information (such as names, addresses, phone numbers, and email addresses) of 70 million Americans and compromised 40 million credit card numbers. use. Just a few weeks later, in January 2014, Neiman Marcus admits that its point-of-sale systems were attacked by the same malware that infected Target, exposing the information of approximately 110 million Neiman Marcus customers, along with 1.1 million credit and card numbers. debit. Then, after months of failings from those two breaches, Home Depot announced in September 2014 that hackers had stolen 56 million credit and debit card numbers from their systems by install malware on corporate payment terminals.
However, an even more devastating and sinister attack is unfolding at the same time. The Office of Human Resources Management is the administrative and human resources division for U.S. government employees. The Department administers security clearances, conducts background checks, and keeps records of all past and current federal employees. If you want to know what’s going on inside the US government, this is the part to hack. So China did.
Hackers linked to the Chinese government hack into OPM’s network twice, first stole the technical blueprints for the network in 2013, then started a second attack shortly after, in which they took control of the admin server that manages authentication for all another server login. In other words, by the time OPM fully realized what had happened and took action to remove the intruders in 2015, hackers were able to steal tens of millions of detailed records on every aspect of their lives. federal employee lives, including 21.5 million Social Security numbers and 5.6 million fingerprint records. In some cases, victims are not even federal employees, but simply connected in some way with government employees who have undergone background checks. (Those checks included all sorts of extremely specific information, such as maps of the subject’s family, friends, associates, and children.)
