Hacks Abound

2018 is ending with some major hacks. Marriott International, one of the world’s biggest hotel chains, announced that hackers compromised the reservation database of Starwood hotels. Hackers managed to steal personal details of about 500 million guests. According to The HackerNews, “The breach of Starwood properties has been happening since 2014 after an unauthorized party managed to gain unauthorized access to the Starwood's guest reservation database, and had copied and encrypted the information.”

The second victim of another major hack is Quora, a user-driven question and answers site(2). According to reports, hackers gained access to sensitive information of over 100 million users. The HackerNews wrote that the stolen data includes sensitive account information, such as names, email addresses, encrypted (hashed) passwords, and data imported from linked social networks like Facebook and Twitter.

The third major hack was on Dell. The company said that it detected and disrupted unauthorized activity on its network attempting to extract Dell.com customer information, which was limited to names, email addresses and hashed passwords. “Additionally, Dell cybersecurity measures are in place to limit the impact of any potential exposure. These measures include the hashing of our customers’ passwords and a mandatory Dell.com password reset. Credit card and other sensitive customer information was not targeted. The incident did not impact any Dell products or services,” Dell said in a blog post.

Even though Dell was not certain if any data was stolen, the company pushed password reset for all users as a precaution.