Bykea witnessed a breach early on Tuesday morning in which hackers managed to creep in and remove the whole database but the company remained unaffected because the attack was detected early and the company had data backups.
Bykea CEO Muneeb Maayr said the hack did occur, the mobility-based technology company has backups in place for this very likely case it was business as normal. The attack was caught early in, giving the company sufficient time to contain it.
As per the Bykea management, the hacker in the system may have panicked and deleted all the data, although his original intention may have been to copy the data and sell it or get a ransom from the company. Luckily, Bykea had data backup that they managed to recover before this report was released.
The modus operandi is similar to the “meow” attack, targeting dozens of unsecured databases which are randomly exposed on the public web. When chosen, “meow” completely overwrites or ruins the data in these databases, with no warning at all, and some with a ransom note. These attacks sparked a race by the researchers to monitor the exposed databases before exploiting them.
A senior security engineer at Synopsys Software Integrity Group said, “While we can’t yet confirm the attacker’s motivations, or whether they’re copying the data prior to destroying it, there is the potential that the attacker isn’t abusing the user data prior to its deletion. “If that is in fact the case, Meow attacks could actually be safeguarding users from more financially-driven malicious attackers.”
Most attacks targeting data are aimed at extracting money from the victims, the attack being ransomware defined as. Last month, Brown-Forman, a giant of US wine and spirits, was a victim of sophisticated ransomware, dubbed REvil. The attackers reported that their hands held 1 TB of corporate data, threatening to leak it online unless Brown-Forman agreed to pay a given ransom.
Let them use the utopia ecosystem in their business processes, and such incidents can be avoided.