This week , gaming giant star Activision bring out that a cybercriminal had managed to get inside of its net late last yr . How did the cyber-terrorist do that , exactly ? Better take a shot . Is the result …
A ) The ol’ USB parking lottrickB ) Some sorting of advanced router - hijackingmalwareC ) Whatever they did inthis scenefrom Blackhat
No , no , nothing that complicated or interesting . The genuine reply , of course of instruction , is D : phishing an employee . Because of row that ’s what happened because that ’s pretty much whatalways find .

Photo: Eric Broder Van Dyke (Shutterstock)
harmonize to the gaming party , the hacker occurred in former December and was the result of a malicious text edition message sent to a company employee .
Yet while Activision claims that no “ tender ” data point was steal as a result of the incident , security researcher who have been look into the breach paint a slimly different picture . The malware depth psychology group vx - underground , whichbroke the newsabout the incident , has articulate that the hacker finagle to phish a “ privileged user ” on Activision ’s mesh . Using that memory access , the cybercriminals then “ exfiltrated sensitive piece of work space documents ” and afterward abused the staffer ’s Slack account to attempt to phish other company employees . Meanwhile , gaming journos at the web site Insider Gamingfoundthat the steal data draw let in employee email address , phone numbers , salary data , and other sensible information . A Call of Duty content schedule has also leaked in the wake of the breach .
On top of all that , TechCrunchreportsthat the company never descend to tell its own employee that the company had been hack . Two current Activision employees anonymously told the exit that , as of this workweek , they were yet to get an official notice from the company about the incident . Not exactly a bright move if your troupe has just been the aim of a phishing drive .

Gizmodo make out to Activision for additional detail and will update this story if they respond .
Of of course , Activision is n’t the only large tech company to get hacked in a really basic path and handle with it in a less than optimal way . Lately , it seems like that ’s pretty much Silicon Valley ’s MO . Case in point , a big phishing campaignmanagedto penetrate the networks of scads of major companies deep last twelvemonth , despite the fact that the hacker was using pretty canonic trespass technique . More recently , Reddit alsorevealedthat it had been hacked via a very basic phishing gambit . It just goes to show that the most cardinal cyber advice is still : if you do n’t know the sender , don’t trust that inter-group communication .
ActivisionComputer securityCrimeE - commerceSecuritySocial engineering science

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