Gadgetory

it wasn't just you 20:17 seemed like a real trash fire part of that flaming pile of garbage was thanks to hacks leaks and ransomware these are our worst acts of 2017 at least the worst ones we found out about first up uber the ride-sharing company had its fair share of controversy this year but one of the most cringe-worthy moments was in November of 2017 the company admitted not only had data for 57 million users and drivers been stolen but that it also paid 100 thousand bucks to the hackers to delete the information come on uber rule number one don't negotiate with terrorists also how does anyone know they didn't just take the money and then not delete the data one company that didn't pay ransom HBO it was hit with a six million dollar ransom demand after then unaired episodes and scripts of its original shows were posted online the hacker claimed to have over one and a half terabytes of data and threatened to post closely guarded spoilers for shows like Game of Thrones shortly after the initial info dump a month's worth of emails from an HBO executive were published and then a couple weeks after that HBO's Twitter and the Twitter accounts of a couple of its shows were all hacked by white hat group our mine in an unrelated breach yikes equally as well protected as Game of Thrones secrets the NSA or was it back in October 2017 The Wall Street Journal reported Russian hackers had stolen information from an NSA contractor running Kaspersky software on their home computer if that wasn't bad enough another embarrassing incident in November of 2017 saw over a hundred gigs of data from an Army Intelligence project code-named red disk completely exposed on a public Amazon Web Services storage server what oddly enough hackers stealing NSA secrets led to the next InfoSec disaster want to cry what started as a vulnerability discovered by the NSA was stolen and weaponized into one of the largest cyber attacks in history over 300,000 computers across 150 countries were affected and caused all kinds of mayhem including hospitals going offline and a Honda factory shutting down the ransomware encrypted data on infected computers and then de andddd payment to restore access fortunately even though a massive number of machines were infected it looks like only 338 victims paid up there's only one hack left to discuss and it was a complete and utter disaster from start to finish that's right Equifax wins our worst hack of 2017 by a landslide in early September the credit reporting company announced as many as one hundred and forty three million people were victims of a massive theft that included names Social Security numbers birthdays and addresses if that wasn't horrible enough for you the company spent the next month tripping over itself to try to paper over the disaster multiple tweets directing victims to a support page that was phony actual support page ending up vulnerable to hacking admitting it waited over a month to reveal the breach after it found out admitting it hadn't patched a key computer system and so on was the hacking equivalent of a trash fire the size of Canada so that's it our picks for worst acts of 2017 or is there something you think should have made the list leave your thoughts down in the comments for more on these and all the other major hacks we saw this year hit up cnet.com I'm Ashley sceva vegan humans