The year 2020 will remain infamous in the history books, and even though covid will forever be the main culprit behind that infamy, it was not the only crisis the world had to face last year. As the world fell into disarray while trying to cope with the economic realities of complete lockdowns, the internet kept things active and ongoing, despite facing a crisis that no one alive had ever faced before.
At the same time when entire industries and even national governments were relying heavily on the internet and its various resources to curb the rate of spreading, the cybercriminals considered the increased online activities as opportunities. This consequently led to the following hacks which kept on coming throughout 2020:
Massive Breach of Card Information at Wawa
In January 2020, an ad came up on Joker’s Stash with the name BIGBADABOOM-III. It contained information from 31 million+ cards (1 million+ international cards), which were all stolen from the US convenience store chain Wawa’s database. The information was being sold by the hackers at $17 per credit/debit card, which would technically amount to well over half a billion dollars in total.
Employee Account Breach at T-Mobile
T-Mobile is one of US’s biggest telecommunications company, and although this was not the first time that they were hacked, it was likely the biggest in recent years. Even though T-Mobile refused to divulge how many customers were impacted by this breach, it has been estimated that the hack was big enough to affect a huge portion of all customers that T-Mobile have ever had until that point in time. This means that present as well as past customers were affected by the breach of data, which occurred after an employee account was successfully hacked by the group.
Hackers Breached NASA with Ransomware
If there was any doubt regarding the importance of maintaining constant and updated cybersecurity measures, then the incident of NASA itself facing a breach should be enough to set things straight. A group by the name of DopplePaymer managed to breach NASA, by first breaching their cybersecurity and IT provider itself! Although nothing has been confirmed since, certain information which they had provided on the dark web did come to light later to provide some evidence that back their claims.
It is unknown whether the 2020 breach was comparatively worse than the infamous NASA and US Defense Department security breach of 1999, but what makes this hack potentially more dangerous is the fact that, aside from whatever information the blackmailers might have been able to steal from NASA, they also gained access to multiple, if not all of the IT service provider’s client information as well.
One would think that hackers would leave the World Health Organization alone in the middle of a global pandemic, but that is far from being true. Elite Hackers, the group thought to be responsible for this shameful breach, leaked roughly 25,000 email IDs and passwords that they had collected from not just the World Health Organization, but also from the National Institutes of Health and the Gates Foundation. Incidentally, they were all working on finding solutions to the epidemic, and this is most likely the reason why they were also able to release vaccine related info on the dark web.
