With years of experience in the technology industry, headlines about cyber attacks and data breaches stand out to me. Here’s your monthly roundup of the latest hacks and data breaches around the world. In this monthly series, I’ll share information and updates on the most recent hacks that I saw in the news, including causes, resolutions, and what you can do to protect your data.
As 2018 has come to a close, we saw what has now become the usual list of successful cyber attacks and data breaches across all industries, one of which I have colleagues directly affected by.
Chinese hackers from the country’s civilian spy agency, Ministry of State Security, stole data from approximately 500 million hotel customers. The data stolen included names, phone numbers, email addresses and credit card information. A colleague of mine noticed fraudulent charges on his credit card and attributes this fraud to the Marriott hack. I recommend checking your bank statements to make sure there is no suspicious activity, and if there is to report it to your bank immediately. Read More
Quora, the question and answer site, reported that a third-party hacked every data point they keep on over 100 million users. Data stolen includes user’s personal information as well as public and non-public content. Quora has notified their users about the situation and recommends for users to change their password not only for Quora but other accounts as well if they reuse passwords. Fortunately, there is no financial information kept by Quora therefore there will not be any fraudulent charges like seen from the Marriott hack. Read More.
On November 7, due to a bug in Google+’s API, 52.5 million user’s data was exposed. Google found the error and corrected it on November 13. The API issue left profile data including name, age, email addresses and occupation open to the public. Fortunately, financial data was not exposed. There is no proof that user’s data was improperly accessed but it does not mean that those affected should not take certain precautions such as changing their password. Read More.
HSBC has reported that some of their US customers’ bank accounts were hacked in October. The data that was accessed includes account numbers, balances, transaction history, users’ names, addresses and dates of birth. This is important personal information that has been stolen, and HSBC has notified those that were hacked and are offering them one year of credit monitoring and identity theft protection services. Although it is unclear whether the hackers have used the data, those notified and effected by this breach should personally monitor their account to watch for suspicious activity. Read More.
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If the inline security tool goes off-line, the TAP will bypass the tool and automatically keep the link flowing. The Bypass TAP does this by sending heartbeat packets to the inline security tool. As long as the inline security tool is on-line, the heartbeat packets will be returned to the TAP, and the link traffic will continue to flow through the inline security tool.
If the heartbeat packets are not returned to the TAP (indicating that the inline security tool has gone off-line), the TAP will automatically 'bypass' the inline security tool and keep the link traffic flowing. The TAP also removes the heartbeat packets before sending the network traffic back onto the critical link.
While the TAP is in bypass mode, it continues to send heartbeat packets out to the inline security tool so that once the tool is back on-line, it will begin returning the heartbeat packets back to the TAP indicating that the tool is ready to go back to work. The TAP will then direct the network traffic back through the inline security tool along with the heartbeat packets placing the tool back inline.
Some of you may have noticed a flaw in the logic behind this solution! You say, “What if the TAP should fail because it is also in-line? Then the link will also fail!” The TAP would now be considered a point of failure. That is a good catch – but in our blog on Bypass vs. Failsafe, I explained that if a TAP were to fail or lose power, it must provide failsafe protection to the link it is attached to. So our network TAP will go into Failsafe mode keeping the link flowing.
Single point of failure: a risk to an IT network if one part of the system brings down a larger part of the entire system.
Heartbeat packet: a soft detection technology that monitors the health of inline appliances. Read the heartbeat packet blog here.
Critical link: the connection between two or more network devices or appliances that if the connection fails then the network is disrupted.