Top 5 Data Breaches of the Decade
In today’s data-driven world, data security has become more relevant than ever before.
Because digital transformation has increased the supply of data moving, the number of data violations, such as hacks and breaches, are steadily increasing.
According to Statista, the average cost of a single data breach worldwide in 2020 was $3.86 million. That’s a costly affair.
Learning from other businesses that have been harmed by cybercrime can help future businesses protect themselves and their customers. In this article, we will be discussing the top 5 biggest data breaches in recent history, including information on those who were harmed, who was to blame, and how the companies responded.
1. Yahoo
Yahoo was subject to a data breach in August 2013, which compromised about 3 billion user accounts. The company originally revealed in December 2016 that the attack affected more than a billion of their customers’ sensitive personal information; including names, telephone numbers, dates of birth and encrypted passwords — had been part of the breach.
Yahoo’s parent company, Verizon, revised the estimate upwards in October 2017, stating that three billion user accounts had been compromised, confirming it as the largest data breach to date.
At the time, it was in the process of being acquired by Verizon, but the deal was completed despite the attack, albeit at a reduced price.
2. Alibaba
In November 2019, A developer working for an affiliate marketer scraped customer data from the Alibaba Chinese shopping website, Taobao, using crawler software he created. This attack was carried out over a span of eight months. The developer and his employer were collecting the information for their own use and were both sentenced to 3 years imprisonment. The breach had Impact on 1.1 billion pieces of user data.
3. LinkedIn
In June 2021, data associated with 700 million of LinkedIn’s users was posted on a dark web forum, affecting more than 90% of the company’s user base. A hacker known as “God User” used data scraping techniques to exploit the site’s API before dumping a first data set of approximately 500 million customers.
They then followed up with a boast that they were selling the full 700 million customer database. While LinkedIn argued that as no sensitive, private personal data was exposed, the incident was a violation of its terms of service rather than a data breach, a scraped data sample posted by God User contained information including email addresses, phone numbers, geolocation records, genders and other social media details, which would give malicious actors plenty of data to craft convincing, follow-on social engineering attacks in the wake of the leak.
4. Twitter
After discovering a bug that resulted in some passwords being stored in readable text on Twitter’s internal computer system in May 2018, the company advised its 330 million users to change their passwords. While no evidence of password compromise was discovered during an internal investigation, the company advised all users of the social network to change their passwords and enable the two-factor authentication service as an additional layer of security.
5. Adult Friend Finder
In October 2016, cyber-thieves stole 20 years’ worth of user data from the adult-oriented social networking service The FriendFinder Network, which was spread across six databases.
Given the sensitive nature of the company’s services, which include casual hookup and adult content websites like Adult Friend Finder, Penthouse.com, and Stripshow.com, the data breach of more than 414 million accounts, which included names, email addresses, and passwords, had the potential to be particularly damaging for victims.
Furthermore, the vast majority of the passwords exposed were hashed using the notoriously weak SHA-1 algorithm, with an estimated 99 percent of them cracked by the time LeakedSource.com published its analysis on November 14, 2016.
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