2020 showed us that cybercrime indeed is a serious modern problem, and each year hackers come up with new scams. Unsurprisingly, they were out in full force, and as usual, basic security is something more people could pay attention to.
So, here are top 5 cybercrime stories of 2021:
1. Former Amazon Web Services engineer got arrested for Capital One data breach.
Capital One has revealed a data breach that affected about 100 million American and six million Canadian customers as FBI officers arrested a suspect.
The suspect turned out to be a former Seattle technology company software engineer Paige Thompson. He was arrested on July, 29th and accused of computer fraud and abuse for supposedly hacking into the financial firm’s data.
According to Reuters, Thompson appeared briefly in the Seattle District Court and was ordered to be detained pending a hearing on August, 1st.
2.Vulnerabilities of Visa credit cards allow contactless limit bypass.
Positive Technologies research has shown that Visa cards have weaknesses in its security system, which can be used by hackers to steal unlimited amounts of money from users' accounts.
Researchers Leigh-Anne Galloway and Timur Yunusov were able to use these weaknesses to bypass verification limits on Visa contactless cards. Five major United Kingdom banks were tested on the subject.
They were able to avoid the UK contactless verification limit of £30 on all tested cards, regardless of the terminal. It was also discovered that this attack is possible with credit cards and card terminals worldwide.
3. 61 arrests were made due to global shutdown on dark web.
Europol has announced that international law forces were able to make 61 arrests as well as detect and shut down 50 dark web accounts which were involved in illegal activity.
Consequently of 65 search warrants, police department was able to take hold of almost 300 kg of drugs, 51 weapons and more than 6.2 million euros, including nearly 4 million in cryptocurrency.
Europol has sent a strong message to those who are involved in selling and buying products on the dark web that they can still be tracked down by the police despite of their anonymity.
4. Small businesses were hit hardest by cybercrime.
Massive cyber-attacks made the small businesses of United Kingdom bear the brunt of £17bn, as stated by Beaming internet service provider (ISP).
Almost 2/3 of UK companies with the amount of employees between 10 and 49 people fell victim to some form of cybercrime in 2020, the examination showed.
The average cost of cyber-attacks to small businesses was £65,000 in damaged resources, financial penalties and business downtime.
5. Cyber-attacks targeting industrial control systems are rising
Malicious cyber-attacks aiming for industrial control systems (ICS) rose to 47.2% in 2020 comparing to 44% in 2019. This affected computers that used Kaspersky Lab security system.
The increase shows that computers which are used as a part of organizations’ industrial infrastructure are threatened the most. And, according to the latest Threat landscape for industrial automation systems report by Kaspersky Lab, the threat keeps rising.
The Lab’s computer emergency response team intends on coordinating the efforts of automation system suppliers, industrial facility owners and operators, and IT security researchers to protect industrial enterprises from cyber-attacks.
