Know the biggest data breaches of 21st century
Breach of data has become an everyday occurrence. In this post, we examine the most significant data breaches of the twenty-first century, concentrating on the magnitude of the risk or damage to the company, insurers, and users rather than the number of records compromised.
What is the definition of a data breach?
A data breach occurs when cyber hackers get illegal access to a company’s database, allowing them to collect sensitive information such as passwords, credit card numbers, social security numbers, banking information, and so on.
What are the factors that lead to data breaches?
According to research, there are three main reasons for data breaches: hostile attacks are at the top of the list, followed (too) closely by human mistakes, and finally, system flaws. Cyber attacks, phishing attempts, malware, ransomware, and other malicious attacks are examples of hostile attacks in this context.
- Yahoo (3 billion user accounts) (2013-2014)
Yahoo stated that it had been the victim of a large data breach while in sales negotiations with Verizon for its core internet business. Names, email addresses, phone numbers, dates of birth, hashed passwords (the great majority with bcrypt) and, in certain circumstances, encrypted or unencrypted security questions and answers” were among the account information. Yahoo’s sale price to Verizon was reduced by $350 million as a result of the breaches. As a result of the damage to its reputation, Verizon changed its name to Altaba Inc.
- eBay’s 2014 user base is 145 million people.
The public sale behemoth ultimately confirmed the records breach in might also 2014, after being chastised for its loss of transparency and “negative implementation of the password-renewal procedure.” when hackers were given get admission to to eBay’s network, all one hundred forty five million of its users’ names, addresses, dates of start, and encrypted passwords have been exposed. What makes this example stand out is that the hacking had nearly little impact on the corporation’s bottom line. Handiest a drop in consumer activity, consistent with eBay’s CEO.
- Equifax (2017)
Equifax, one of the largest credit bureaus in the United States, confirmed in September 2017 that a data breach was caused by an application vulnerability on one of their websites. 143 million people’s social security numbers, birth dates, addresses, and, in certain circumstances, drivers’ licence information were exposed as a result of the data breach.
- Stored at Target (2013)
Target introduced a statistics breach in December 2013, confirming that hackers received access to goal’s factor of sale payment card readers via a 3rd-birthday party HVAC dealer, compromising the credit and debit card numbers, in addition to the total names, addresses, e mail addresses, and cellphone numbers of approximately 40 million clients. Target’s CIO and CEO both left, and the corporation assessed the breach cost at $162 million.
- Uber (2016)
Hackers stole the names, email addresses, and mobile phone numbers of 57 million Uber app users, as well as the driver licence information of 600,000 Uber drivers, according to Uber. The worst part of the Uber data breach, though, is that Uber delayed almost a year before publicly confirming the issue, and they paid hackers $100,000 to destroy the data in such a way that no verification could be done. Uber claimed it was a “bug bounty fee” at the time, but its CSO was fired soon after. Uber’s brand was harmed as a result of the data leak, which lost the company not only money (its valuation decreased from $68 billion to $48 billion).