Page 51 - Cyber Warnings

Shortly thereafter, he put the personal information of 9.3 million clients of a medical insurance
agency up for sale for 750 bitcoins (around a half million dollars).

But if there’s one theft we should be talking about, it’s the one that happened at Yahoo.
Although it took place in 2014, it only became known recently.

A total of 500 million accounts were compromised, becoming the greatest theft in history.

On August 2, one of the greatest bitcoin thefts in history occurred. Bitfinex, a company that
deals in the commerce and exchange of cryptocurrency, was jeopardized and had an equivalent
of 60 million dollars in bitcoins stolen from it, money which belonged to clients that had
deposited their bitcoins in this “bank”.

There is still no evidence pointing to the culprits, and the company has offered no information as
to how it happened, as law enforcement agencies are still investigating the case.

DDoS Attacks

In September, Brian Krebs, the famed journalist specializing in security, blew the cover off of
vDOS, a “company” that offered DDoS attack services.

Shortly thereafter, the people responsible, who in two years had lead 150,000 attacks and made
a profit of $618,000, were arrested.

Not long after, Krebs’s website began to receive a crippling DDoS attack that brought it down for
a week. In the end, Google, through its Project Shield, was able to protect it and the page came
back online.

In the last quarter of the year, a wave of large-scale cyberattacks against the American internet
provider DynDNS jeopardized the service of some major global corporations’ websites.

The brutal attack affected major organizations and international communications tools, such as
Netflix, Twitter, Amazon, and The New York Times.

Service was interrupted for almost 11 hours, affecting more than a billion clients worldwide.

Social Networks

The security of 117 million LinkedIn users was at risk after a list of email address and their
respective password hashes were published.

On Twitter, 32 million usernames and passwords were put up for sale for around $6000.
The social network denied that the account information had been attained from their servers.

In fact, the passwords were in plaintext and the majority of them belonged to Russian users,
hinting at the possibility that they were attained by means of phishing or Trojans.

51 Cyber Warnings E-Magazine December 2016 Edition
Copyright © Cyber Defense Magazine, All rights reserved worldwide