Biggest calamitous cyber attacks in the history of Internet.
Data breaches affecting millions of users are far too common. Here are some of the biggest and baddest breaches in recent memory.
Not long ago, a breach that compromised the data of a few million people would have been big news. Now, breaches that affect hundreds of millions or even billions of people are far too common. About 3.5 billion people saw their personal data stolen in the top two of 15 biggest breaches of this century alone. The smallest incident on this list involved the data of a mere 134 million people.
- Adobe
Year (2013). Adobe announced in October 2013 the massive hacking of its IT infrastructure. Personal information of 2.9 million accounts was stolen (logins, passwords, names, credit card numbers and expiration dates). Another file discovered on the internet later brought the number of accounts affected by the attack to 150 million (only 38 million active accounts).
2. LinkedIn
Year(2012 and 2016). LinkedIn is the latest victim of a massive data breach and data of over 500 million of its users has been scraped from the platform and posted online for sale. The dataset includes sensitive information like email addresses, phone numbers, workplace information, full names, account IDs, links to their social media accounts, and gender details.
3. Facebook
Year(2019). The leaked data includes personal information from 533 million Facebook users in 106 countries. Facebook decided not to notify over 530 million of its users whose personal data was lifted in a breach sometime before August 2019 and was recently made available in a public database. Facebook also has no plans to do so, a spokesperson said.
4. Yahoo
Year(2014 and 2017). The Internet service company Yahoo ! was subject to the largest data breach on record. Two major data breaches of user account data to hackers were revealed during the second half of 2016. The first announced breach, reported in September 2016, had occurred sometime in late 2014, and affected over 500 million Yahoo! user accounts. A separate data breach, occurring earlier around August 2013, was reported in December 2016. Initially believed to have affected over 1 billion user accounts, Yahoo! later affirmed in October 2017 that all 3 billion of its user accounts were impacted. Both breaches are considered the largest discovered in the history of Internet.
5. Marriott International
Year(2018). Marriott reported a data breach that saw an estimated 339 million guest records exposed globally, of which around seven million related to UK residents. An investigation into the incident revealed that an unauthorized party had been accessing the network of Starwood Hotels and Resorts Worldwide Inc. since 2014, copying and encrypting information.
Even after discussing some biggest data breaches in the history of Internet. Question stills is the same? Is our data, information and privacy, A joke for Company? Is Privacy a myth?