It goes without saying that 2020 has been a funny old year. Whilst much of our focus has been on Covid-19 and everything else that it has brought with us, we seem to have forgotten about the fact that life has still gone on. With more and more businesses working in a remote way, Covid-19 has had an impact on a variety of aspects of how we work, and one way is that there is a much higher risk of data breaches.
In fact, it has been reported that during the first half of 2020, there have been 81 reports from data breaches, all of which are companies in different countries around the world.
Any data breach is not good news. For businesses or for those who have had their data put at risk. It will put your business in a bad light and will make customers wonder whether or not you can be trusted to actually protect them. Even though for the most part, the data breach is not your fault.
To help to make you feel that you are not alone and that there are others out there who have also had to worry about their data and how it is used, we have put together the 3 biggest data breaches that have occurred during 2020.
1) THE GREAT TWITTER BREACH
One of the biggest breaches of the year has to be the well covered in the media, Twitter breach. There were as many as 130 high level accounts that were targeted within the breach, including huge names such as Elon Musk and Bill Gates.
Not only were 45 the passwords of 45 of the accounts changed, but then the hackers actually posted fake tweets from the account, asking for donations to be made to a Bitcoin address. Unfortunately the hack managed to have an impact before it was picked up and it is thought that the hackers actually ended up with as much as $120k in the pockets.
2) THE MARRIOTT DATA BREACH
Back in March 2020, the global hotel chain that it is Marriott shared that they had been the victim of a security breach that had impacted as many as 5.2 million hotel guests after using their loyalty app. It is thought that the hackers were able to gain access to the login details of 2 employees within the Marriott, who in turn held information regarding the loyalty scheme that customers has signed up to.
It took a month for the data breach to be identified, which gave the hackers plenty of time to obtain as much information as they could and then use it to their advantage.
3) MGM AND THE DATA DUMP
Before the Marriott data breach we had the MGM Data Dump. It was thought that the data breach itself actually happened in late 2019, however, it was only in February 2020 that the rumours started to circulate. It was at this time that hackers leaked personal details of as many as 10.6 million hotel guests, and worst of all, the access to their data was free for anyone to use. However, it is thought that the real number could be as much as 14 times this.
The information that was able to be downloaded was name, address, DOB and phone numbers and email addressed too. This included guests such as celebrities and government agency workers too.
Data breaches can happen to any company at any time, which means that you need to do whatever you can to remain vigilant and to pay attention to your data security.