Top 8 worst online security breaches in history revealed
8 of the worst online security breaches in history. (Image Source: CNBC)
No matter how well guarded a website and database is there will always be some hackers who will find a way to breach through the system. These online security breaches happen on a daily basis. However, for the most part, these regular offences happen on a small scale.
This, however, doesn’t mean that these breaches can’t happen on a large scale. On the contrary, there have been many massive online security breaches reported in the past. These attacks, which saw the hacking billions of records, caused serious damage to the respective companies. All while infecting them with a virus in the process.
With this in mind, My Digital Mate has compiled a list of some of the worst online security breaches in history.
Here are 8 of the worst online security breaches ever recorded:
1) Epsilon
Epsilon is a global marketing company that offers their clients insights of the mass consumers. Through the companies email communications, which built up data from over 2,000 companies all over the world, the company was vulnerable to an attack.
In the early months of the year 2011, they experienced a massive online breach. This breach exposed about 250 million records and cost the company US$4 billion. To this day, there are still no reports about the identity of the hacker.
2) Heartland Payment System
Heartland Payment System is a company that handles credit card payment transactions of merchants. They cater to over 250,000 businesses. Having that many credit card details entering the system had cybercriminals scheming about how to get their hands on the data.
In January 2009, the company discovered the breach in their system. The discovery was made after a number of credit card companies reported suspicious transactions on all cards that went through Heartland’s system. To make matters extra worse, the breach started a year ago before the discovery, in around March 2008. The breach saw over 130 million people have their credit card data stolen. Luckily, the hackers were captured and were sentenced to prison. It was reported that the hackers used SQL injection to get their spyware in the system.
3) Sony’s PlayStation Network
In the middle of the year 2011, Sony’s PlayStation Network had experienced a significant breach into their system. The breach affected the accounts of more than 100 million user accounts and saw over 20,000 people have their credit card data stolen. This massive attack on Sony’s system forced them to shut down the PlayStation Network for almost a month. During the shutdown, Sony went through 65 lawsuits against them. The company lost a total of $171 million because of the breach. Until now, the hacker is left unidentified.
4) TJX Company
The hack on TJX Company in 2006 grabbed the attention of the world at that time. Many people speculated that the company was not using a firewall to protect data. That was the suspected reason why hackers were able to steal more than 90 million credit card details.
The breach saw TJX lose over $250 million. Luckily, the group of hackers were identified and brought to justice. It turned out that these hackers were also the ones behind the other massive hack in Heartland Payment System.
5) CardSystem Solution
The CardSystem Solution hack would have been prevented if they had just encrypted those highly confidential credit card details. Because of their failure to do so, hackers were able to breach CardSystem Solutions by using a SQL Trojan. A total of 40 million people had their credit card information stolen in the breach.
6) FriendFinder
FriendFinder is an online company that helps their customers find friends, dates, lovers and so on. This group houses the personal information of millions of people. The data stored by the company includes things such as names, birthdays, email address and much more.
In 2016, FriendFinder along with its other browsing websites was hacked and more than 400 million accounts were compromised. To make things worse, it turned out that these accounts’ passwords were only protected by a breachable SHA-1 hashing algorithm. A lot of personal and private data had fallen into the hands of the unidentified hackers who still remain at large.
7) Target Stores
Target is one of the biggest retail stores in the world. But in the end of 2013, the company made headline news when they announced a massive breach in their system.
This breach targeted their POS payment card reader and had stolen almost the credit and debit card information of around 40 million people. Adding to that, at the beginning of 2014, Target also discovered that 70 million customers also had their personal information stolen in the breach. A total of 110 million records were stolen from Target in just a month. This incident cost Target $162 million.
8) Yahoo
Yahoo is one of the largest search engine companies known to everyone. However, in the 2013 and 2014, Yahoo had experienced two massive online security breaches by two different hacking groups.
These groups were able to steal the personal information of about 3.5 billion users. Yahoo had lost $350 million worth of sales because of the breach. Ever since then, Yahoo has undergone many clean-ups to prevent a similar breach from happening again.
In a nutshell
With these massive breaches recorded, it just shows that personal data is not completely safe on the Internet. A lot of firewalls and secure encryptions will need to be developed and updated in order to strengthen the online security system further. Companies are now finding new ways to protect their data and that of their clients.
Contributed by Kimberley Garret, My Digital Mate