Priya PatelIn a recent article from IT World Canada, cybersecurity reporter Howard Solomon discusses some of the major cybersecurity incidents from the week ending on January 19, 2024. Some key points from the article include:
- Cryptocurrency scammers have been hacking the social media accounts of companies and well-known individuals, such as the recent hack of the city of Peterborough, Ontario. The motive behind these hacks is to promote cryptocurrency scams.
- An individual in Ukraine was arrested for using hacked cloud accounts to create 1 million virtual servers for mining cryptocurrency.
- An accounting firm employee falling for a phishing scam recently led to the disclosure of customer names from an American laptop maker.
- Several companies, including Atlassian, Ivanti, Citrix, SonicWall, and Juniper Networks, issued security updates to fix major vulnerabilities in their applications.
- The ‘Have I Been Pwned’ website added millions of unique email addresses to its data store from a credentials-stuffing database on the dark web.
- An American home loan provider, Academy Mortgage Corp., notified over 248,000 individuals that their personal data was stolen in a cyber attack.
- Google updated its explanation of what the Chrome browser’s Incognito mode does and doesn’t protect users from.
- The Governor of New Jersey signed data privacy and breach notification legislation.
- A cybercrime syndicate has been compromising smart TVs and set-top boxes for the past eight years to create a massive botnet called Bigpanzi.
Throughout the article, Solomon provides analysis and commentary on each incident, discussing the implications and possible solutions to prevent future cyber attacks. He emphasizes the importance of strong security measures, such as multifactor authentication and regular security audits, to protect against hacking attempts.
