Some hackers who are affiliated with a left wing group which is infamously known as the RedHack group recently said that they had gotten into three emails of the incumbent Turkish Energy Minister, Berat Albayrak.
Reports which came out of Turkey showed that the hack actually was as a result of a huge data dump which goes back as far as April 2000, (people don’t have anything to do anymore). The data dump is said to have about 17 GB of email information.
The hackers managed to get into the Energy Minister’s accounts because, apparently, Mr Albayrak used the same password on multiple accounts. This made it easy for the hackers to get into all the accounts after obtaining a password. Mr Albayrak was therefore no match for the keylogger that the hackers are said to have used to attack him.
In theory, he could have not done anything when faced with the keylogger that the hackers supposedly used, even if he had used a different password for each of his accounts. But even though, he did make the job easier for the hackers as they needed to only hack into one account before breaking into everything else. Their chances of succeeding were increased as a result.
Mr Albayrak must have not used the two factor authentication system either. The two step verification process, ( as it is rather known in some some circles) is a method where a user has to show a one time login code which is usually sent through texts or can be venerated by the dedicated mobile app.
This will be on top of also typing in your password, which means that even though you use the same password on the Internet, you can still get another layer of protection.
The two step verification process does not necessarily mean online security but it makes the process of stealing passwords and access to accounts even harder and that’s why the feature is highly recommended.
Turkey responded to the data dump and hacking incident by temporarily blocking the cloud based storage devices which included Dropbox, Microsoft OneDrive and the Google Drive feature.
Internet users who are privacy conscious and even those who just want to keep their data and files secure in this fast paced world are reminded to follow the safety and security guidelines of the Internet.