The hackers don’t seem to be taking any time off for the holidays, and the cyber attack count for 2015 keeps climbing. There have recently been multiple hacking attempts against a variety of companies. As of yet, no compromised records have been reported, but we thought you might like to know about these potential cyber threats.
Moonfruit
The web host Moonfruit allows customers to build easy templated websites, and they host tens of thousands of sites—both personal and business. On Thursday, December 10, Moonfruit was threatened with a cyber attack when hackers overwhelmed the company’s servers with traffic. This prevented them from being able to serve legitimate users.
In an effort to end this attack and prevent any attempts at hacking into and stealing client information, Moonfruit took down over 10,000 business and personal websites starting at 10:00 GMT today. The web host informed the site owners that their websites would be offline for as much as 12 hours.
Customer response to this announcement was less than enthusiastic. Reece de Ville, a filmmaker who has a site hosted by Moonfruit, said, “I’m going to have hundreds of people finding my site today but not being able to access it. I could be losing out on a lot of money from potential clients, and they may not come back.”
Twitter recently issued an alert to some of their users, warning them that they may have been targeted by state-sponsored hackers. Though the micro-blogging site stated that there was no evidence that the hackers had obtained any personal information, their warnings did state that the hackers may have been trying to gain access to sensitive account data, such as email addresses, IP addresses, and phone numbers.
Though this is the first time that Twitter has reported any such attack against it users, it does come amid rising concern about state-sponsored cyber attacks. This year, businesses, media outlets, and government agencies have all been victims of hacks.
As far as the threat against Twitter goes, as of yet, it appears that the hacking attempts were only against a few accounts. However, there is no indication of why the threatened accounts were targeted, and it is possible that more attempts will be made to obtain information from other user accounts.
To add to the concern, Google and Facebook have also recently begun to issue warnings to users that may have been targeted by state-sponsored attacks. There are even concerns surrounding the latest Barbie doll, Hello Barbie. This talking toy comes with software that allows it to speak to your child, and some people believe hackers could use this software to steal your family’s information. It would seem that nobody is safe from the threat of cyber attacks these days.
With all of these rising threats, it becomes more important than ever to ensure that your personal security habits do not put your personal information at risk. To find out how your habits measure up in the scope of data security, take our latest quiz here.