03 Sep 6 Biggest Data Breaches to Know

As more and more companies experience crippling security breaches, the wave of compromised data is on the rise.

Data breach statistics show that hackers are highly motivated by money to acquire data, and that personal information is a highly valued type of data to compromise. It’s also apparent that companies are still not prepared enough for breaches even though they are becoming more commonplace. Best South African online casinos have compiled six most popular data breaches.

1. Yahoo Data Breach (2017)

Yahoo disclosed that a breach in August 2013 by a group of hackers had compromised 1 billion accounts. In this instance, security questions and answers were also compromised, increasing the risk of identity theft. The breach was first reported by Yahoo while in negotiations to sell itself to Verizon, on December 14, 2016. Yahoo forced all affected users to change passwords and to reenter any unencrypted security questions and answers to re-encrypt them.

However, by October of 2017, Yahoo changed the estimate to 3 billion user accounts. An investigation revealed that users’ passwords in clear text, payment card data and bank information were not stolen. Nonetheless, this remains one of the largest data breaches of this type in history.

2. Aadhaar Data Breach (2018)

In March of 2018, it became public that the personal information of more than a billion Indian citizens stored in the world’s largest biometric database could be bought online. This massive data breach was the result of a data leak on a system run by a state-owned utility company. The breach allowed access to private information of Aadhaar holders, exposing their names, their unique 12-digit identity numbers, and their bank details. The type of information exposed included the photographs, thumbprints, retina scans and other identifying details of nearly every Indian citizen. This kind of breach can happen with pokies online real money Australia due to the advanced security technology implemented.

3. First American Financial Corporation Data Breach (2019)

In May 2019, First American Financial Corporation reportedly leaked 885 million users’ sensitive records that date back more than 16 years, including bank account records, social security numbers, wire transactions, and other mortgage paperwork.

4. Verifications.io Data Breach (2019)

In February 2019, email address validation service verifications.io exposed 763 million unique email addresses in a MongoDB instance that was left publicly facing with no password. Many records also included names, phone numbers, IP addresses, dates of birth and genders.

5. Facebook Data Breach (2019)

In April 2019, the UpGuard Cyber Risk team revealed two third-party Facebook app datasets had been exposed to the public Internet. One, originating from the Mexico-based media company Cultura Colectiva, weighs in at 146 gigabytes and contains over 533 million records detailing comments, likes, reactions, account names, FB IDs and more. This same type of collection, in similarly concentrated form, has been cause for concern in the recent past, given the potential uses of such data. Read more about this Facebook data breach here. This database was leaked on the dark web for free in April 2021, adding a new wave of criminal exposure to the data originally exfiltrated in 2019. This makes Facebook one of the recently hacked companies 2021, and therefore, one of the largest companies to be hacked in 2021.

6. LinkedIn Data Breach (2021)

Data associated with 700 million LinkedIn users was posted for sale in a Dark Web forum on June 2021. This exposure impacted 92% of the total LinkedIn user base of 756 million users. The data was dumped in two waves, initially exposing 500 million users, and then a second dump where the hacker “God User” boasted that they were selling a database of 700 million LinkedIn.