A Year in Cyberattacks: Top Malware Incidents of 2019

Nobody is safe from malware attacks and 2019 was certainly a year that proved that. Here are the top malware incidents of 2019, in no particular order. 

Just About the Entire Population of Ecuador Gets Hacked 

You can’t talk about major malware incidents without looking at what happened to Ecuador. The country was hit with a data breach that saw around 20 million people, including the president of Ecuador, along with the founder of WikiLeaks Julian Assange (who had been granted asylum by Ecuador) have their information stole. 

The breach was reported by vpnMentor, stating that the data in the breach came from government registers, the Ecuadorian national bank, and from an automobile company. The information included the date of birth, personal identification numbers, and driving records of the victims. 

885 Million Files are Stolen from the First American Corporation 

A hack on the First American Corporation website saw over three-quarters of a billion mortgage deal documents, which included tax records, bank account numbers, Social Security numbers, and more stolen by hackers. 

The hack was reported by KrebsOnSecurity who say they had been tipped off by someone who told them that anyone who could access one document on the site could access others by changing a single digit. Anyone could view the records without any authorization. 

Facebook Falls Out of Favor – Again 

Facebook users already have a lot of distrust for the social network, and that distrust only grew in 2019 as the phone numbers of over 200 million users were discovered in an unsecured and open database anyone could access. While Facebook doesn’t appear to have put together the database, the phone numbers had been matched to user IDs of Facebook users. 

Another incident happened in November when Facebook users discovered that they had accidentally given bogus apps access to their Facebook account and there was no telling what had been taken from them. This all comes less than a year after Facebook was hit with the Cambridge Analytica scandal where the analytics firm was able to access information on millions of Facebook users. 

Capital One Hack Exposes Millions of Americans 

The Capital One bank admitted that they had been the target of a “data security incident” in July of this past year. The incident actually occurred back in March and it could have affected around 100 million people in the United States, as well as six million Canadians. 

The firm lost data that included customer names and addresses, credit ratings, birth dates, and more. It is believed that the breach was done by a lone hacker who broke into the system using a “configuration vulnerability” that was discovered on July 17. 

The good news is that customer login credentials and credit card information wasn’t stolen. The bad news is that some social security numbers were. Around 140,000 American customers and a million Canadian customers had their Social Security number stolen. 

Evite Invites Hackers 

The popular invitation website Evite was hit by a huge data breach in April. The hack became apparent when the information of millions of users found its way to a dark web database. ZDNet identified the hacker has Gnoisticplayers and reported that the hacker sold the information for bitcoin. The information included the user records of 10 million users including their name, country, login credentials, IP address, and more. 

The hack grew following the initial report and it is now believed that it affected over 100 million users. Evite admitted that they had been hacked and that the data dates back to 2013. The company forced users to recreate their password if they had been affected, but this came too late as their information was already in the hands of the wrong people. 

Conclusion

As bad as these data breaches are the worst part is that they all had one thing in common; they were entirely preventable. Be sure to brush up on what you can do to prevent data breaches and prevent yourself from becoming a victim of hacking.