It seems that cyber criminals have advanced to the new level of impudence as they continue hacking major websites. It is no big news already that Yahoo was hacked twice or thrice and suffered millions of user accounts’ leak. Later on, crooks pointed their targets to MySpace and Linked domains. Such online market giant as Amazon did not escape cyber criminals‘ attention as well. While the IT specialists rush to patch security flaws, the users are left with a dilemma: is there a safe website on the Internet?
Users who have been using Yahoo mail might have been astonished after finding out that enormous amount of personal data was leaked and more than 500 million users were affected by this breach. Surprisingly, such violation, which actually took place in 2014, has been published only recently. Speculating. why such act has been concealed from public attention for such a long time, many users arrived at the conclusion that the cyber attack might have been supported by governmental institutions. Soon afterward, conspiracy theories started booming.
Another popular website, MySpace.com, also has a notorious history of hijack. The website was escalated in different news portals after detecting the data leak including more than 427 million passwords. While some crooks use them to hack into owners‘ bank accounts, others simply sell the data on the dark net. Luckily, the latter document with the size of 14 GB was spotted by a virus researcher. Despite various data leak alerts, users still keep using plain and ordinary passwords. Due to that, hackers gain more chances of invading several accounts at the same time.
Moreover, Amazon is said to be the next target as it was assaulted by a Twitter user in July after the company ignored his remarks on obvious security flaws. Their indifference resulted in 80 000 leaked user login passwords. Recently, the website has been compromised again as it rushed to reset the passwords of selected users while denying and data breach. These hijacks prove that users still are not self-cautious and do not take necessary security measures. They only realize the importance of changing login credentials regularly after they become the victims of a cyber crime. For the future note: think up of a password containing numbers and characters, change it every three months and use different passwords for different accounts.