Even after ionCube’s many years in the web security industry, producing tools for PHP developers to protect their software and our ioncube24.com website protection suite, we’re still shocked at the number of major infosec stories reported each week. Here is our look back at the biggest shockers of 2019 so far!
10. We start the countdown with our posting from March 8th which headlined with something we see a lot of, database leaks! I’m a Games Design graduate so naturally anything gaming tends to stick out and earlier this year we read about Armor Games and how a ‘database mega-hack‘ exposed details for 617 million online accounts, 100% of its users as of February 2019!
9. Our post for January 25th summed up a good week for infosec news where our main headline story was about a hack to a Nest brand camera where a fake nuke alert was played into a family home causing ‘sheer terror’ to the couple living there.
8. I love a good authentication failure story and our posting on January 4th featured a great one! Hackers managed to bypass some pretty cool vein-based authetication tech… with a fake hand.
7. Same week different story as Ryanair send a flight itinerary to the wrong Gary! There is a great quote in the article from Gary himself which I imagine a lot of people have thought to themselves when using their name in an email address – “A lot of people seem to think that my email address is theirs”.
6. Big data leaks are always newsworthy and our post on January 25th featured a story on a casino data leak where details of 108 million bets were leaked!
5. I had to include a ransomware story somewhere on this list and so in at 5th and from March 29th we have the aftermath of Norsk Hydro’s ransomware infection and a $40million loss.
4. Another authentication failure in the 4th spot as our March 15th posting headlined with the Galaxy S10 phone and how its face unlock could be fooled by siblings of the phone owner.
3. Our May 3rd post included some news about World Password Day but the headline story is what gets the number 3 slot with Docker Hub experiencing a database hack that exposed 190k users sensitive data.
2. GDPR has been a massive talking point in the office since 2017 (and still is) and so for number 2 I have included a story from our January 11th post which made the news everywhere. Misleading Data consent in IBM’s Weather Channel app got them in a lot of trouble with the article saying “The Weather Channel app duped users into providing location data that the company then sold for advertising and other commercial purposes”.
1. The top slot for 2019 so far comes from February 15th where the headline itself really stresses how bad infosec problems can get, especially when everything, even your backups, get hacked and erased – “Email provider VFEmail was hit by a destructive attack, where a hacker who accessed its network was able to erase its servers in the United States, including the backup systems.”
This is just a fraction of the massive number of issues we read about every week.
