Explain why hacking is just like cancer, it has a hazardous effect today.

Hacking is just like cancer, it has a hazardous effect today. Even though your system is highly secured, hacker finds a way to crack into your system and take away information. The primary motivation for hackers is money, or breaking the rules inspires hackers to indulge in such acts.

One of the most recent hacks that happened in recent times was on Under Armour; the company also admitted that around 150 million MyFitnessPal user accounts were hacked. The sports giant stated that the attack happened when an unauthorized party acquired data associated with MyFitnessPal user accounts. The company took steps to determine the nature and scope of the attack and did alert the MyFitnessPal account users. The data includes username, password, and email address but not the bank, driving license, or social security information. The team tried to investigate the issue and later began to notify MyFitnessPal account users via email and through in-app messages. Later, users were notified to change their account password immediately. MyFitnessPal app allows users to monitor their calorie intake and measure it against the amount of exercise they are doing using a database of more than 2 million foods.

Under Armour uses a function called bcyrpt, which is used to secure passwords. Bcrypt is a password hashing function designed by Nielis Provos and David Mazieres, based on the Blowfish cipher, and presented at UNISEX in 1999. Bcrypt is a cross-platform file encryption utility. Under Armour said that they had used a well-regarded password hashing function to convert most of the password it stores into chaotic, unintelligible assortments of characters. When appropriately implemented, the cryptographic process is time-consuming for attackers to attempt to crack the password and revert them to their useful form. Bcrypt hashing; a strong password can take decades to break. Upon more investigation, Under Armour admitted some proportion of the exposed passwords were only using hashed a notoriously weak function called SHA-1, which had known flaws for a decade. MyFitnessPal account information that was not protected using bcyrpt was protected with SHA-1, a 160-bit hashing function.

References:

Lily Hay NewMan (30th March 2018) – https://www.wired.com/story/under-armour-myfitnesspal-hack-password-hashing/

Paul Lamkin (30th March 2018) – https://forbes.com/sites/paullamkin/2018/03/30/under-armour-admits-huge-myfitnesspal-data-hack/#39fad703cc54