Cyber-attacks have become recurrent with major corporate giants falling prey to criminal hackers. The recent Facebook (FB – Free Report) security breach has been the talk of the town since September when the company announced that accounts of about 50 million users were hacked.
Last week, Facebook reported that the graveness of the attack was less than what the company had initially estimated. Although 50 million accounts were hacked, hackers were able to steal personal information of about 30 million users, a CNBC report cited. The attacks were carried out via access tokens that allow users to log into their accounts without providing passwords every time.
The nature of the recent cyber breaches demand an unconventional approach each time to detect the possible threats. While most technology giants and companies focus on fixing and building immunity to the existing security issues, it is necessary to learn of probable new risks and how to tackle these.
Given the persistent cyber-attacks it’s a good idea to focus on some cybersecurity stocks that are most likely to benefit from the rising security breach issues.
Facebook’s Security Violation
According to Guy Rosen, vice-president of Product Management at Facebook, hackers used an automated method to gain control of some 400,000 accounts. Using these, they gained access tokens of 30 million users, thus compromising their accounts.
Of these, 14 million users had their username, gender, locale/language, relationship status, religion, hometown, self-reported current city, birth date, types of devices used to access Facebook, education, work, the last 10 places they visited or were tagged in, people, pages or websites they follow, and the 15 most recent searches. For 15 million people, hackers were able to obtain name and contact details while no information was stolen of the remaining 1 million people.
How to Avert a Data Breach
Earlier this year, Under Armour’s (UAA – Free Report) MyFitnessPal app and Expedia’s (EXPE – Free Report) Orbitz were victims of cyber-attacks too. Orbitz had a data theft that affected 880k customer credit cards and MyFitnessPal’s security breach compromised as many as 150 million accounts, exposing sensitive information such as names, email addresses, and passwords.
