Twitter Inc.
Twitter advised users to change their passwords this morning after they found “a bug in its systems that exposed passwords in plain text internally,” according to Bloomberg. This may be a good wake up call to change your other passwords too.
We recently found a bug that stored passwords unmasked in an internal log. We fixed the bug and have no indication of a breach or misuse by anyone. As a precaution, consider changing your password on all services where you’ve used this password. May 3, 2018
Panera Bread
For eight months Panera Bread leaked millions of customer’s information, in plain text, on their website. They issued a statement to Fox News at the beginning of April.
The Commonwealth Bank
In 2016, Australia’s largest national bank lost several storage drives containing the financial histories of 12 million customers. This was revealed in a Buzzfeed investigation that was published earlier this week.
The breach occurred when a CBA contractor was decommissioning a data centre and several magnetic tape drives were lost. They potentially came off the back of a truck on the way to be destroyed.
— Paul Farrell (@FarrellPF) May 2, 2018
Aadhaar
At the beginning of this year, Aadhar (India’s absolutely massive biometric and geographic ID database that assigns residents a unique 12 digit number) was compromised after India’s The Tribune paper bought a service being sold over Whatsapp that “provided unrestricted access to details for any of the more than 1 billion Aadhaar numbers created in India thus far.”
Oregon Tax Agency
In March, The Oregonian reported that an Oregon tax collection agency employee stored the data of 36,000 people to a personal account. This data included social security numbers. The breach was initially detected in late February, but the agency waited a month to disclose.
Porsche Japan
In February it was announced that over 28,000 email addresses from customers of Porsche Japan were leaked in a hack. The hack was apparently initially detected between Jan. 23 and Feb. 11.
These are just six of many, many cybersecurity and data protection leaks and breaches to have happened, or come out, this year. IT Governance has an ongoing and extensive list for further reading, rounding up incidents on a monthly basis.
Looking ahead, MIT Review published a piece that outlined some cyber threats we should be worried about this year. Among them, “more huge data breaches.”
