Savvy Chick

The year 2009 has seen some astounding developments in the field of technology.  But at the same time the level of security threats has also risen considerably.  One can also say that the security breaches has skyrocketed than the early years as many have been a victim of phishing attacks, Orkut hacks and so on.  A survey reveals that the number of personal records exposed was 220 million this year which needs uttermost attention.  So as the year draws to an end here is the list of some favourite security breaches which rocked this year:

1. Conflicker: It is one of the most widespread botnet of the decade.  Although it is not considered as a top security breach, the Conflicker is still in the top because it has infected millions of PC’s.  Mainly China Telecom’s and Microsoft are its top victims.
2. Phishing attacks on Banks:  A lot of bank users are victims of fake pages and e-mails.  This has resulted in huge financial loss for many and this has happened because many are not unable to recognize a genuine e-mail or page easily.




3. Heartland Payment Systems: This one is the most popular of the year 2009.  More than 130,000,000 credit card records were stolen using the SQL injection exploits.  As a matter of fact the Heartland has agreed to pay compensation of $3.6 million to AMEX for the security breach.
4. Interception of US Drone unencrypted Video Feeds:  This is one of the funniest one of the year 2009.  Terrorists were able to access US drone live video feeds easily by using a $26 shelf software called SkyGrabber.  It was very sad to know that the military does not use any encryption technologies for their video feeds which is quite surprising.  That is why the enemies were able to get easy access to these confidential video feeds  This may result in a huge exploit because the US drones uses a system called ROVER which is also been implemented in our fighters, bombers and other drones.
5. Virginia State Prescription Monitoring Records- Ransomed:  One of the daring and smartest security breach one can say because it was a big challenge posed by the hackers to the Virginia State.  Almost arounf 8.3 million records were stolen, erased and an encrypted backup of VPMP’s database was done.  In addition to this the hackers has defaced the website demanding a ransom of $10 million bucks bit they never got it.  This was the note posted for the ransom:  “I have your shit! In *my* possession, right now, are 8,257,378 patient records and a total of 35,548,087 prescriptions. Also, I made an encrypted backup and deleted the original. Unfortunately for Virginia, their backups seem to have gone missing, too. Uhoh For $10 million, I will gladly send along the password.”.

These Security threats really rocked us and also helped us to learn new things which could be avoided in the future.

Related posts:

1. Need For USB Disk Security
2. Cisco’s Plan for Cloud Apps and Securing Mobile