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December 22, 2019

How the Recent Leak of 267 Million Facebook Users Could Hurt Every Business


Hackers have become as sophisticated as companies using analytics, AI and marketing automation to target users.

There is a trove of data on the dark web and cross-referencing it all can be easily done via inexpensive cloud-computing resources.

At this point, hackers have a profile of every user they want to target.

They know the likes and desires of these people and can quickly send out mass phishing messages based to desires and preferences.

Billions of records have been hacked and continue to be hacked.

Just the hacking news from the last few days is extremely scary when you realize the sheer size of it all.

Ring doorbell users, 15 million LifeLabs patients, 170 million Zynga passwords, WaWa customers and so on.

7.9 billion records were accessed by hackers this year so far with 8.5 billion accounts expected to be hacked by the end of the year!

The majority of the over 5,000 data hacks this year Risk Based Security has tracked so far consisted of only a few million accounts. Yet there were a few mega hacks that involved hundreds of millions.

This gets us back to the headline of this post… Over 267 million Facebook users just had their information leaked on the dark web. The confidential records were first made available on Dec. 4, according to the researchers’ timeline, and made their way to a hacker forum eight days later.

They were taken down Thursday after Diachenko informed its internet service provider about the unsecured information — but not before sitting as a download in the hacker forum for a week.

The database belongs to “a criminal organization” in Vietnam “according to the evidence,” the researchers said.

Most of the affected users — 267.1 million in total — were American.

The challenge for every organization is this information can be used for spear phishing – to target workers so directly that they will have trouble not clicking.

This is very bad news and sadly, we expect 2020 to be the worst year ever in terms of cybersecurity.

How do you stay secure or at least drastically reduce the risk? Follow these three steps to start:

1) Read cybersecurity essentials – a simple list which will help most organizations become far more secure.

2) Go to a phishing simulation vendor now and sign up for one of their offerings. Phishing BoxKnowBe4 and Phish360; are all great. This is needed to train workers by testing them without their knowledge by sending real-looking emails to their inboxes. If they click, they are immediately trained on what not to do.

3) We also recommend you get a free evaluation of your cybersecurity risk from an MSP/MSSP immediately – they can also help you build in the needed compliance to reduce the risk of being fined.





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