TOP 5 most damaging CYBER ATTACKS of 2022

Sun, 25 Feb 2024 05:31:23 +0000

Millions of people were affected by cybercrimes this year. Billions of dollars stolen. Terabytes of data leaked on the Dark Web. And amongst these cyberattacks, five cases stand amongst the rest, the worst of them all, malicious and destructive. These are the top 5 biggest cybercrimes of 2022.

⚔️ Russian-Ukraine cyber warfare

Cyber warfare has been on the rise since day one of the Ukraine-Russia cyber war. Throughout this year, Ukraine’s internet security was rigorously tested with relentless cyberattacks from various hackers. Ukraine had to deal with a Russian-affiliated hacker group targeting over 1,500 government, public and private entities. Fend off hacking attacks on Telecom operators and server providers. Avoid phishing attacks aimed at government agencies. And even dig for malware in translation software that seemed completely innocent. But the worst thing is, those are only select cases out of more than 200 separate instances of Russia hacking Ukraine throughout the war.

A colossal retaliation from Ukraine is undeniably the attack of the hacker collective Anonymous. Russia suffered heavy blows from the hackers, which managed to infiltrate Russian Sberbank, leaking a lot of sensitive data. Other threat actors have sown chaos in Russian infrastructure for a while, through data leaks, DDoS attacks, and even taking advantage of people’s fear of mobilization. Some big IT companies lost employee data due to smart phishing attacks, promising “mobilization delays”. One hacker collective even managed to cause an explosion on the Hydro-power plant, causing massive economical damage, but no casualties.

🌎 Costa Rica vs Conti Ransomware gang

In April of 2022, a ransomware gang known by the name of their software - “Conti”, launched a devastating attack against the country of Costa Rica. Capable of accessing the government’s network, Conti ransomware affected over 1TB of sensitive data, with the majority of backups encrypted by ransomware. Hackers demanded 10 million dollars in return for releasing the data. The damage dealt by the threat actors has exceeded this number tenfold, estimating 60 million dollars on average for each day the foreign trade and tax platforms were paralyzed. Even the entire country's treasury went offline - causing massive civil unrest on top of monetary losses. In the end, Costa Rica ended up not paying a single cent to the Conti cyberattack, and since then, the group was on a decline.

₿ Crypto.com hack - $34+ millions stolen

Crypto-trading platform Crypto.com has announced that over 500 of their users were hacked. Through these hacked accounts, hackers managed to steal cryptocurrencies worth somewhere between 34 and 35 million USD according to various sources. Usually, it would be impossible for someone to initiate a trade through Crypto.com without possessing a 2-Factor authenticator. However, hackers managed to somehow disable or bypass this security measure, or it wasn’t working properly in the first place. In any case, the Crypto.com hacker went through the security and left with the haul untouched: he was never caught.

💻 A teenager breached Microsoft

This March, a threat actor managed to breach a corporate account of a single Microsoft employee, gaining access to incomplete source code of Bing, Bing Maps, and Cortana. Only through fast response by the Microsoft personnel was the scope of the attack reduced. Still, the hacker must not have been too experienced, or was too complacent, as he left enough traces to get tracked down. A 16-year-old teenager left unnamed for legal reasons, was identified to belong to the group of Lapsus hackers. Further along the way, the hacker's identity got leaked by a competitor hacker group, revealing him to be a citizen of Oxford, England.

🔌 1TB of data stolen from NVIDIA

This year, NVIDIA suffered at the hands of the hacker group Lapsus. NVIDIA got acquainted with them almost a month before the Lapsus Microsoft hack. This time, however, the attack was very well planned, and most importantly - had a direct incentive. It has to do with the crypto mining limiter on NVIDIA RTX 3000-series graphic cards. Lapsus disliked this new change enough to breach NVIDIA servers on February 25th, stealing trade secrets, GPU chipset files, and more - over 1TB worth of confidential information. Lapsus threatened to leak all the data unless NVIDIA promises to remove mining limiters and make all future GPU drivers open-source. Naturally, NVIDIA didn’t even bother complying with such ridiculous demands.

00:00 Overview of 5 biggest cyber attacks of 2022
00:45 Russian-Ukraine cyberwar
03:17 Costa Rica vs Conti: Ransomware
05:13 Crypto.com Hacked
06:25 Microsoft Lapsus$ Hack
07:23 NVIDIA Lapsus$ Hack
08:54 What to expect for cyber crime in 2023

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