We’re only 7 months down 2018 and there are already plenty of businesses that have been hit with data breaches. Not only are these data breaches large, but they also highlight many of the weaknesses that businesses have. These factors all combine to not just cause monetary losses, but also the loss of credibility. Moreover, they stunt the growth of a business as well.
Other businesses are taking it as a learning opportunity to do better as data breaches are seriously becoming more widespread with each passing year. The following are some businesses that suffered from major data breaches in 2018:
1. Under Armour – My FitnessPal App – March 2018
In March 2018, Under Armour owned app, MyFitnessPal was attacked by hackers, which resulted in the information of 150 million users becoming compromised. The breach of the app happened in mid-February 2018, but it wasn’t caught until March 2018. Nonetheless, Under Armour showed great initiative by informing all affected users as quickly as possible.
They also had data protection measures in place that prevented hackers from accessing user information such as their credit card information, birth dates, location or more. However, the risk appeared in the fact that some of the sensitive data were secured with hashing software, namely SHA-1, which is known to have some flaws.
2. Typeform – June 2018
Counted among the best data collection software that is utilized by major brands who want to conduct market research, surveys, order forms, questionnaires, and more Typeform suffered a data breach in June 2018. Hackers successfully downloaded a partial backup the business had created of customer data. This not only put Typeform at risk but also exposed other major businesses to risk too.
Unfortunately, Typeform handled the situation by keeping things vague and only informing concerned users about what hasn’tbeen compromised. This has forced many companies to take initiative on their own. Brands such as Adidas, Revolut, Monzo, Birds Eye, Fortnum, Masons, Trello, Slack and more had to inform their users that their data was compromised through Typeform.
3. My Heritage – October 2017 to June 2018
With over 92 million users affected, MyHeritage had one of the biggest data breaches that occurred in October 2017 and went undetected till June 2018. A file containing the email addresses, passwords were found on a private server. Further inspection showcased that it did contain data of about 92 million users who signed up for MyHeritage.
The good news is that MyHeritage’s security measures negated risk and even the data collected was not enough to cause serious damage. They also took active security measures to inform all users about the data breach as well as explain the active measures being taken to prevent the situation from ever happening again. Regardless of this, many people were skeptical of the company, particularly given that the business has access to a lot of sensitive information, including data on DNA and more.
While these are some of the most major breaches that have happened in 2018 only, the number of data breaches has grown considerably over the past few years.
