Three days ago, Snapchat released a response to security professionals at Gibson Security who claimed numerous exploits of the app’s API.
Snapshot replied they had implemented various safeguards to make it more difficult to do.
Those safeguards weren’t enough. A team of hackers posted 4.6 million usernames and phone numbers of Snapchat users as a downloadable just before midnight on Tuesday. The data is partially obfuscated by blurring the last two digits of each user’s phone number. The anonymous hackers hinted that they might turn over the raw data to the ‘right party’.
On New Year’s Eve it was reported that the USA’s National Security Agency hacked into SEA-Me-We-4, a subsea cable system that connects Europe to Asia via the Middle East and North Africa, according to documents seen by German news site, Spiegel Online International. The documents, part of the haul of information leaked by computer analyst and whistleblower, Edward Snowden, reveal that the NSA’s dedicated hacking unit, the TAO (Tailored Access Operations) “successfully collected network management information for the SEA-Me-We Undersea Cable Systems (SMW-4)” on February 13, 2013.
FoxIT, reported on its blog that a number of its clients had encountered infections on or before 3 January after they visited yahoo.com. “Based on a sample of traffic we estimate the number of visits to the malicious site to be around 300,000 per hour,” FoxIT claimed on its blog.
The Syrian Electronic Army (SEA), a group of hackers that supports the Syrian government, has claimed credit for hacking Skype’s official blog, Facebook and Twitter feeds last Wednesday.The group claimed that the attack on Skype, which is owned by Microsoft, was in retaliation for Microsoft’s alleged involvement in spying by the US National Security Agency.
Not a good start to 2014 for security for one last year’s hot apps.
At the end of 2013 Reuters reported that a hacker secretly took over a computer server at the BBC, Britain’s public broadcaster, and then launched a Christmas Day campaign to convince other cyber criminals to pay him for access to the system. The BBC’s security team responded to the issue last Saturday and believes it has secured the site. A BBC spokesman helpfully stated “We do not comment on security issues,” .
So you might like to take a look at this infographic from Deloitte.
http://www.cloudtweaks.com/2014/01/cloud-infographic-security-breaches/
