Page 80 - BBC Knowledge - October 2017 IN

Science
Technology

/THE BIGGEST HACKS IN political hacks. “If hackers are patriotically
minded, they start to make their own
RECENT MEMORY contribution to what they believe is the good
fight against those who speak badly about
MACRON EMAIL LEAK Russia,” he said in a recent interview.
Just 48 hours before the run-off poll between (Those with longer memories will point out
Emmanuel Macron and Marine Le Pen, that interfering in the elections of satellite
a 9GB cache of emails from Macron’s states was a favourite activity of the US during
En Marche! party was posted on PasteBin, the 1980s – it just wasn’t done online.)
a filesharing platform. They were spread to One side of the answer is the exposure
WikiLeaks. “The attacks were so simple and of people to the internet. As the Internet of
generic that it could have been practically Things grows, we are adding ‘attack vectors’
anyone,” France’s cybersecurity chief said. to our lives. We are opening more and more
doors for hackers to walk through. “Smart
home technology has not yet been universally
adopted, so attackers don’t have much to gain
BANGLADESH BANK HEIST from it other than nuisance value,” explains
In February 2016, hackers got the login credentials Emms. But that may soon change when smart
used by Bangladesh Central Bank for the home technology reaches a tipping point,
international banking transfer system SWIFT. They and the weaknesses are there to be exploited.
tried to transfer $951m to accounts in Sri Lanka and “Companies who have never had to think
the Philippines. Most transactions were flagged, about internet security in the context of
but $101m was removed. A Trojan known as Dridex standalone products wake up to the need
was used, which hides in MS Word or Excel for security when they add Internet of Things
attachments. functionality,” says David Harley, a security
consultant and chief operations officer for
WANNACRY ATTACK the Anti-Virus Information Exchange Network.
On May 12, 2017, a global ransomware attack Although, he adds, the smart home’s sheer
affected more than 2,30,000 computers, scale could also act in its favour.
including PCs in the NHS, FedEx and “Because of the wide diversification of
Deutsche Bahn. The malware was leaked brands, technologies and devices, the scope
from the NSA, and targeted machines of an individual attack may be comparatively
running Windows XP and Windows 2003.
The attack yielded just over $1,26,000 in
When I started,
payments and caused considerable upheaval.
it really was

YAHOO! BREACH the Wild West
In 2016, Yahoo! was forced to confirm that its systems
had been breached twice, in 2013 and 2014, resulting out there. And
in the loss of more than a billion users’ personal
information, including passwords. The hackers used there was an
fake browser cookies that allowed them to dupe
the site’s login systems. To date, it is the largest loss innocence to it.
of customer data by any single company.
When groups
of us met in
CHIPOTLE ATTACK
The Mexican restaurant chain, which has more
than 2,250 outlets in the USA, reported that, chatrooms, we
if you paid with a credit card between
March 24 and April 17, 2017, your credit card did not realise
details had almost certainly been obtained by PHOTOS: GETTY X3, ALAMY X2, SHUTTERSTOCK
hackers. The attack vector has not been we were
confirmed, but the malware involved allegedly
read the card data directly from the machines creating
as they took payment.
criminal gangs
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OCTOBER 2017