Ashley Madison, Anonymous and all top the list for hacking scandals this year
FROM spouses with a wandering eye to white supremacist groups, this has been a massive year in terms of hacking.
I COULD be biased because my email was among those leaked, but the Ashley Madison hacking scandal had to be the worst cybercrime of the year.
It all started with a hacking collective, known as The Impact Team, taking offence to the website designed for people looking to have an extramarital affair.
As such, they stole the personal data of customers on the website and threatened to release it unless the parent company permanently took Ashley Madison offline.
The company didn’t comply, which left the hackers no choice but to follow through on their threat.
In a massive data dump, the hackers exposed personal information — including real names, emails and secret sexual fantasies — of the website’s 39 million users.
While I embraced the leak because I was a single man browsing the website out of curiosity, a number of authentic users were left scrambling trying to cover their tracks.
Among those concerned were the 700-plus Australian government officials and police officers that had joined using their work email.
But then there were the people like the 40-year-old Sydney resident, known only as Octavia.
She had been periodically using Ashley Madison since 2012, all with her husband’s blessing and support.
While he didn’t partake himself, he was more than happy for his wife to meet other men for sex.
Then there were the victims — depending on your view on the matter — like David Browne.
The district school superintendent living in New Jersey, lost his job, his wife, his mind and possibly his freedom over his reaction to the hack.
Mr Browne sustained severe burns while trying to torch his garage after confessing to his wife and school board he had an account with the infamous infidelity site.
Two Canadian law firms have filed a $578 million class-action lawsuit against the parent company, which are still on going.
ANONYMOUS VS EVERYBODY
Hacking collective Anonymous are freshest in our minds because of the ongoing cyber war with Islamic State.
But, it has been a long year for the hactivist group and it all started in January after terrorists murdered 12 people during the Charlie Hebdo attacks.
Anonymous released a video and a statement via Twitter condemning the attack before announcing it was going to start targeting terrorist organisations.
Next up were those colourful characters attending the Anti-Islamic Reclaim Australia rallies in April.
The hacking collective promised to organise counter rallies on the same day to combat what it described as “an extreme right-wing group inciting religious hatred”.
In June, Anonymous hit Canadian government websites with a Denial of Service attacks — making a network resource or computer system unavailable by flooding it with more requests for information than it can handle.
The attacks were in protest of anti-terror legislation that granted additional powers to Canadian intelligence agencies.
By now it was October and the hacking collective announced it would reveal the names of up to 1,000 members of the Ku Klux Klan and other affiliated groups.
“You are terrorists that hide your identities beneath sheets and infiltrate society on every level. The privacy of the Ku Klux Klan no longer exists in cyberspace,” Anonymous said in a statement.
A month later, a list of 57 phone numbers and 23 email addresses allegedly belonging to KKK members surfaced online.
However, Anonymous denied it had released the information.
The Paris attacks sparked a fresh cyberwar with Islamic State, which now claims to have seen the removal of over 12,000 social media accounts related to the terrorist organisation.
And now Donald Trump has come under fire from the hacking collective.
It’s been a busy year indeed.
I BOUGHT A JEEP
Imagine driving down the road at 100km/h in a brand new Jeep Cherokee.
Now imagine a hacker manipulating a flaw in to take control of your car while you are at the wheel.
This is exactly what happened when Wired worked with two white-hat hackers.
The security experts used a backdoor in the car’s infotainment system to install malicious code into the computer system.
At first the hackers just toyed with driver by remotely hacking the stereo and blasting cold air through the airconditioner.
Then things got serious and they took over the car’s transmission and brakes.
After the event, the hackers alerted Chrysler, the makers of Jeep, and a patch was issued.
Luckily, a press release from Fiat Chrysler Automobiles said the security flaw did not impact Jeep vehicles sold in Australia.
That didn’t mean it wasn’t an embarrassing lesson for the company, as they had to issue a safety recall for 1.4 million US cars and trucks after the scandal.
“The recall aligns with an ongoing software distribution that insulates connected vehicles from remote manipulation, which, if unauthorised, constitutes criminal action,” said FCA US, the American arm of the Italian auto group, in a statement.
The recall announced involved a broad range of Dodge, Jeep, Ram and Chrysler cars and trucks produced between 2013 and 2015 that had radios vulnerable to the hacking.
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