Exploring the ‘mother of all breaches’: understanding the cybersecurity breach impact and defending your data.
Last week, cybersecurity experts revealed a massive data breach involving more than 12 terabytes of information and 26 billion individual records. Dubbed “The Mother of All Breaches,” the leak includes information previously stolen from popular apps and well-known companies like Tencent, X/Twitter, LinkedIn, Adobe, and hundreds of other organizations.
Researchers who dug into the treasure trove of online material said that the database contained nearly 4,000 folders—and each folder contained millions of records scraped from past data breaches.
Leading the way were 1.5 billion records swiped from Tencent and 504 million from Weibo, two Chinese technology conglomerates. Also included in the top platforms affected were 360 million records from MySpace, 281 million records from X/Twitter, 251 million records from LinkedIn, 179 million records from Evite, and 153 million records from Adobe.
Even more concerning were the government records from agencies in the U.S., Brazil, Germany, the Philippines, Turkey, and other countries. As of press time, no specific hacking group has claimed responsibility for this massive compilation of breached info. But experts theorize that many different organizations could have come together to consolidate their stolen records and present a united front in the face of recent crackdowns on hacking and cybertheft.
What Does the “Mother of All Breaches” Mean for Me?
With billions of pieces of personal information compromised, bad actors could leverage the aggregated information for a wide range of attacks, including identity theft, sophisticated phishing schemes, targeted cyberattacks, and unauthorized access to personal and sensitive accounts.
Given the scale of the breach, many cybersecurity experts recommend that consumers proceed under the assumption that their data was probably caught up in it. If you reuse usernames or passwords across multiple accounts, hackers could launch a tidal wave of credential-stuffing attacks—testing one stolen login across hundreds of different platforms until they gain access to sensitive data.
Protecting your business, your data, and your digital identity in the wake of such a massive attack might feel hopeless. But there are still plenty of steps you can take to better protect yourself.
Below, CMIT Solutions collects seven tips that can help businesses across North America increase their cybersecurity protocols and respond to harmful incidents:
• Update passwords and turn on multi-factor authentication (MFA). If you can’t remember the last time your employees updated their passwords, ask them to do it immediately. These strengthened credentials should include long, memorable phrases that use letters, numbers, and special characters. Then, as an extra layer of login protection, activate MFA to serve as another line of defense against system intrusions that take advantage of stolen or weak passwords. MFA is an authentication method that requires a user to combine something they know (a password) with something they have (a unique code delivered via text or email, or a push notification to a mobile device).
• Roll out updates for any older software and hardware. Small businesses, government agencies, and companies operating in certain industries are often slow to patch or update legacy systems. Hackers know how to target such vulnerabilities, so if your organization has neglected to install a critical software update, it can lead to significant cybersecurity impacts. Taking a proactive approach means deploying patches and updates automatically and during off hours when they won’t affect employee productivity.
• Enhance system monitoring. Many businesses think antivirus software is enough to stop ransomware attacks or data breaches. But as hackers become more sophisticated, the tactics required to stop them must become more robust, too. This includes intrusion detection tools like SIEM/SOC that can identify vulnerabilities before they’re exploited, network traffic analysis that can recognize indicators of suspicious activity, and advanced firewalls to provide stronger security for sensitive data.
• Beef up email protection. Cybersecurity experts expect “The Mother of All Breaches” to lead to a surge in phishing schemes and other email-based attacks. Simply keeping an eye out for suspicious messages is no longer sufficient. Instead, enhanced email monitoring is a must to automatically detect dangerous links or illicit attachments, quarantine questionable messages in sandboxes for further review, and flag emails that may appear legitimate but actually come from spoofed domains. Strengthened inbox rules can spot subtly misspelled domain names or poorly written subject lines, preventing those messages from ever landing in your inbox.
• Monitor or deactivate unused devices, ports, and endpoints. Local government agencies and small businesses often struggle to offboard departing employees and deactivate old or unused devices. But these can represent easy targets for hackers. A trusted IT partner can help you monitor device activity and detect irregularities to prevent unauthorized access using Remote Desktop Protocols (RDPs), a common tool used in today’s hybrid workplace to manage administrative settings.
• Prioritize data backups. One way to mitigate ransomware attacks and data breaches is to have reliable, remote, and redundant data backups in place. That makes information recovery and reinstallation a breeze, even if computers or hardware are affected. Many businesses opt for free consumer solutions like Google Drive and Dropbox, but these aren’t adequate for enterprise use. Testing these data backups before a disaster strikes is critical, as well, so that you can ensure they function properly—and you can know how long it takes to restore data.
• Worried that your information is caught up in “The Mother of All Breaches”? Contact an IT provider like CMIT Solutions immediately. Quick action can often minimize the impact of a data breach or ransomware infection and mitigate the spread of stolen information before it affects interconnected systems. If you receive a message claiming to hold your stolen data hostage or demanding payment for its return, shut down your computer immediately and unplug it from all Internet connections and local networks. If needed, a cybersecurity expert can help you modify your company’s public IP address so that any information shared on the dark web in a database like “The Mother of All Breaches” is no longer attached to user logins or current system settings.
CMIT Solutions is committed to helping clients of all sizes protect their information in the face of ongoing data breaches. We work with small mom-and-pop shops, multinational corporations, and everything in between to defend client data, secure devices and networks, and empower employees to work productively and efficiently.
If you’re concerned about “The Mother of All Breaches” or worried that your information has been compromised, contact CMIT Solutions today. We take cybersecurity protection seriously and work 24/7 to protect your information.