From FireEye to Twitter to Covid-19 vaccine research ⁠— these were the biggest cyber attacks of 2020

Cybersecurity firm FireEye earlier this month revealed that hackers accessed tools used by the company to test its customer’s security. The attack reportedly has affected several organizations. The company has said that the toolkit could be used to mount more attacks across the world.

Suspected Russian hackers reportedly installed a malware in the Orion software sold by SolarWinds, a major IT company and accessed sensitive data belonging to several US government agencies and companies like Intel, Cisco, VMware and Nvidia. The company revealed that over 18,000 of its clients have been impacted in the breach.

The personal information of over 5.2 million customers was accessed by hackers using login credentials of two of its employees at a franchise property of Marriott International. Details such as names, date of birth, phone number, language preferences and loyalty account numbers were accessed in this breach.

In July, over 130 high-profile Twitter accounts were compromised by hackers and used for a bitcoin scam. These accounts were used to post tweets asking users to send bitcoins to a specific wallet and promised to return twice the number of bitcoins as a charitable gesture. The hack was done using social-engineering and targeted the company’s employees.

British budget airline EasyJet was reportedly targeted by Chinese hackers and the personal information of over 9 million passengers and credit card information of over 2,000 passengers was stolen.

The New Zealand stock exchange was hit with multiple cyberattacks. The stock exchange’s website was blocked using distributed denial of service (DDoS) attacks, prompting the country to deploy its spy agency to stop the attacks.

Over the past few months, there have been several attempts to target companies working on the Covid-19 vaccine. Vaccine researchers in Canada, France, India, South Korea and the US were targeted during this attack. Microsoft revealed that seven prominent companies were targeted in this attack by nation-state actors.

Indian pharmaceutical company Dr Reddy's Laboratories was targeted with a ransomware attack in October this year. The company’s investigation revealed that no information was accessed during this attack and the company was able to isolate all its servers.