What kind of bad things are going on today on the Internet?
Have you heard of formjacking, cryptojacking, and ransomware?
Formjacking is where a retailer’s credit card “form” was hacked by criminals and the credit card information is sent to the criminal as well as or instead of the vendor you are expecting to buy something from.
For example: you are on XYZ company website and are buying a product. On this website the webpage is called a “form”. So when a form is hacked some call it ‘jacked’. I.e. Formjacking. Guess which websites got hacked? Ticketmaster and British Airways.
From: Theinquirer.net
Interesting to note the story said that the 3rd party software at fault was Inbenta, which apparently is an AI and natural language processing software.
Forbes also had a story to say that 380,000 passengers were affected by a malicious hack. This particular hack was done on the main website of British Airways, which holds your personal information (name/address/passport#/and other financial info).
The next threat is cryptojacking, here the hacker tries to insert software in any systems that you run which tries to run cryptomining software so that your computers are used to mine cryptocurrencies. although some currencies are no longer as valuable, this is still a moneymaker. The malicious software is easy to install and let run, so even though the returns are not as high… the risk for the criminal may be lower.
Ransomware is always a threat, and usually inserted when people click on spam. The spam is linked to software that downloads and then overwrites your data. Ony if you pay a ransom will the data be released .
It is interesting to note that most of these issues can be fixed by patching your software and systems . But if you do have an ecommerce website then you have to hire someone to attempt to hack the ecommerce software.