Data Security Lessons from Recent Anti-Virus Companies’ Breaches

Anti-Virus are believed to be prone to virus and other malicious attacks. But let it ia ironical to say that
now Antivirus companies are also victim of online breaches and vulnerabilities. It was revealed recently
that three US based cybersecurity companies got hacked by an international cybercrime group, Fxmsp.

The Fxmsp breach

About 3 months back, Fxmsp which is a group of high profile Russian and English speaking hackers,
jointly hacked three top antivirus companies in US. Companies' source code from its anti-virus software ,
security plug-ins and AI technology was hacked. They have started selling the source code and access to
the networks for over $300,000.

A investigation is ongoing by FBI, but the victims are yet to be officially identified. A report by Bleeping
Computer provides us with some clues, suggesting that the victims are McAfee, Symantec, and Trend
Micro.

Its not the first case of an antivirus company being hacked. Earlier too in 2012 it was revealed that
hackers get into the Symantec networks six years earlier and thus stealing Norton security's source code.
Later on Kaspersky and Bitdefender were also attacked. Though the victim companies clarified that there
was no impact on the company with the attack, but it does make sure that even antivirus companies are
also vulnerable to such threats.

Most of the time the breachers are not revealed and the thing that is public is only the hoard of data
that has been compromised. It shows us the reality of cybersecurity companies. It just simple as that,
more the data a company store, more is it vulnerable.

The personal information of users stored in companies are most costly and that is what a hacker needs.
Hackers simply extort that data or sell it on the grey market. So the solution may arise if cybersecurity
companies don't posses such data, attacks may be less severe.

In this era of customer focused business, companies should promise to keep privacy and data of good
heir users secure and safe.