HACK-IN-A-BOX
1)Best at hiding in plain sight: This June, Russian hackers used Brittany Spear’s official Instagram to communicate by planting coded messages within comments on her posts. Random phrases like “#2hot make loved to her, uupss HHot #X” were actually ways to relay to other hackers where to drop stolen information in a malware scheme.
2)Worst company efforts: In September 2016, Yahoo discovered that at least 500 million user accounts had been breached. To make matters worse the company later disclosed the hack had happened in 2014 but had only just been found. To make matters even worse again mid-December Yahoo dropped another bomb that they had lost the data of one billion users in 2013 (Could you be among them? Head to www. haveibeenpwned.com to check).
3)Most creative: Just because you’re high up in a skyscraper, doesn’t mean you’re immune from WiFi hacking. Researchers in Singapore managed to steal confidential documents by using a mobilee-nabled drone that sought out open WiFi printers.
4)Most worrying: Stuxnet was a malicious computer worm that was able to spy on industrial systems and even cause things like fast-spinning centrifuges to tear themselves apart, unbeknownst to the human operators at the plant. Although the creators of Stuxnet haven’t been officially identified, the size and sophistication of the worm has led experts to believe that it could have been created only with the sponsorship of a nationstate. Stuxnet was later thought to be used by the US and Israel to destroy centrifuges in an Iranian nuclear enrichment facility.
5)Similarly worrying: In 2016 a new type of malware targeted the city of Kiev. The malware aimed at the power gird and led to major outages in the Ukrainian capital. Similar to Stuxnet, this type of malware aims to cause actual physical disruption, rather than just digital. An updated version had the ability to ‘speak’ to the controls and could switch the flow of power on and off. That means Crash Override could perform blackout attacks more quickly, with far less preparation, and with far fewer humans managing it. It’s thought the malware gained access through a Phishing email.
6)Toys ‘r’ us: Early this year CloudPets, a connected toy that records personal messages and stores them on iCloud was the target for a hack. The details, which included email addresses and passwords, were leaked along with access to profile pictures and more than two million voice recordings of children and adults who had used the stuffed toys. The recordings were traded on an online site and CloudPets’ original database was wiped. CloudPets failed to alert customers of the breach until it became public. And with more connected devices coming on the market, security experts are predicting more breaches like this.
7)Just plain stupid: Donald Trump's senior aide Kellyanne Conway suggested Barack Obama could have monitored the President through a microwave. She claimed surveillance could be conducted with "microwaves that turn into cameras," and added: “We know this is a fact of modern life.”