this post was submitted on 12 Jul 2024
201 points (99.5% liked)
Technology
59769 readers
3782 users here now
This is a most excellent place for technology news and articles.
Our Rules
- Follow the lemmy.world rules.
- Only tech related content.
- Be excellent to each another!
- Mod approved content bots can post up to 10 articles per day.
- Threads asking for personal tech support may be deleted.
- Politics threads may be removed.
- No memes allowed as posts, OK to post as comments.
- Only approved bots from the list below, to ask if your bot can be added please contact us.
- Check for duplicates before posting, duplicates may be removed
Approved Bots
founded 2 years ago
MODERATORS
you are viewing a single comment's thread
view the rest of the comments
view the rest of the comments
Cyber security is a very complicated field. There are an infinite number of ways that someone could have breached security. It could have been and statistically was a social engineering attack.
There are software vulnerabilities all of the time that can be exploited for access. Recently SSH was discovered to be vulnerable across all Linux machines running at least a certain version of SSH. It didn't require the victim to do anything but be online.
Microsoft had a zero day that required no interaction that could give kernel level access to a users computer with them knowing.
Neither of those are likely the culprit, but ATT is a large company that has valuable data that hackers wouldn't mind putting extra effort into getting. At my current company that works with healthcare information, the number of attempts on us this year, that we are aware of, has more than tripled from all of last year.
Point being, some was probably negligent in that they clicked a bad link in an email, gave away something sensitive of a phishing call, or some other social engineering attack, because humans are often the weakest point in cyber security.