Round-Up: Hacks, Leaks, and Breaches

Election troubles, Yahoo data breaches, Reddit invades North Korea, and DDoS attack through IoT
Hacks, leaks, and data breaches happen around the world on a regular basis. We do our best to keep you up to date with the latest news, so you can stay aware and protected. However, more news breaks on these subjects than we can report on this blog. This regular feature compiles a list of our recent articles and stories about hacks, leaks, and data breaches published elsewhere.

The upcoming presidential election brings up fears of hacking the democratic system, the data breach of Yahoo continues to dominate the news cycles, and we get a peek at the minuscule internet superhighway (more like a dirt road) of North Korea thanks to Reddit.

• Election 2016: Susceptible To A Malicious Hack? “Are concerns over a hack into voting machines unfounded? No, according to experts who say outdated systems in electronic voting machines and lack of proper auditing could make the election process susceptible to hackers.”

• Yahoo Confirms Data Breach Of 500 Million Users “Yahoo has now confirmed what we reported earlier Thursday about a data breach and bumped the number of affected users up to 500 million.”

• Password Sharing Isn’t Just A Terrible Idea, It’s Potentially Illegal “This July, the courts changed the tone of the conversation with a ruling that, arguably, made password sharing illegal.”

• Cyber Firm Challenges Yahoo Claim Hack Was State-Sponsored “A cyber security company on Wednesday asserted that the hack of 500 million account credentials from Yahoo was the work of an Eastern European criminal gang, adding another layer of intrigue to a murky investigation into the unprecedented data heist.”

• Here’s Why Trump’s Hotel Company Got Slapped With a Big Fine “The New York Attorney General slapped Donald Trump’s hotel chain with a $50,000 fine over a data breach the company didn’t bother to tell customers about for months after it was discovered. More than 70,000 credit card numbers and other personal information was exposed, the AG’s office announced in a press release.”

• Russian Hackers Target Simone Biles, Serena Williams In Medical Data Leak “The Russian hackers, known collectively as “Fancy Bear” or “Tsar Team,” published private medical records of four Team USA stars: Olympic gold medalist and gymnast Simone Biles, tennis giants Serena and Venus Williams and basketball MVP Elena Delle Donne.”
• Reddit Brings Down North Korea’s Entire Internet After Links To Country’s 28 Websites Are Posted Online “When a list of North Korea’s available websites was posted on Reddit, the surge of visitors to the reclusive state’s online offering overloaded the servers. North Korea runs a completely locked-down version of the internet that consists of only 28 “websites” that the population is allowed to view.”
• Massive DDoS attack harnesses 145,000 hacked IoT devices “In what some are calling the biggest distributed denial-of-service attack ever seen, a botnet comprising thousands of hacked IoT devices took aim at a European web host earlier this month – flooding it with a data deluge that at times exceeded one terabit per second.”