2018’s big five breaches – Forbes asks The Defence Works

This week, we we’re approached by Forbes to comment upon five of the biggest data breaches from 2018 and what they might mean in 2019.

In a recent blog, we’d already discussed a number of other big breaches affecting UK citizens from the year so far but of course, globally, there have been some hefty data breaches too.

The Forbes article look at the following, big data, hacks of 2018:

• Facebook: the dominant data player has suffered several breaches this year, with the worst seeing at least 50 billion users compromised
• Marriott: affecting the personal records of over 500 million customers
• Quora: in which up to 100 million accounts were compromised
• British Airways: where payment information of nearly 400,000 accounts were intercepted by cybercriminals
• Ticketmaster: involving the personal data of over 40,000 users.

Amongst a range of cyber-security experts, our Managing Director, Eddie Whittingham, provided his insight into the Quora data breach:

“Quora’s data breach was pretty punchy, mainly because it exposed the names, email address and encrypted passwords, as well as data from social networks like Facebook and Twitter, to which people had connected their accounts.”

“Perhaps most interesting, is how the cybercriminals might then go on to use the data, such as questions and answers posed on the platform. I’d expect to see this information sold on the dark web and if there are any contentious questions or answers in there, the fraudsters will be sure to make use of this information and possibly look to hold some users to ransom.”

You can read the full Forbes article here.