As the internet becomes ever more prevalent in our society, particularly with businesses, it is important to address the rise of cyber-attacks. Cyber-attacks happen very commonly among individuals, but you rarely expect a large company to suffer badly from these attacks. However, there are many cases of large companies suffering malicious attacks ranging in severity, but ultimately costing each company substantially.
Yahoo by far encountered the biggest data breach ever in 2013, continuing into 2014. They did not admit this until 2016. They finally revealed that the cyber-attack led to copious amounts of sensitive information being compromised spanning across 500 million users reportedly.
This figure rose to 1 billion when only a few months later, Yahoo were hacked again and further sensitive information including recovery questions and answers were also compromised. It wasn’t until 2017 where Yahoo stated that all user accounts, revealed to be at around 3 billion were compromised after revision.
Another well-known giant on the receiving end of a cyber-attack is the online marketplace of eBay. This attack occurred back in 2014, where up to 145 million users of the website had their information compromised. The attackers had inside access for over half of a year.
One of the good things about this situation, was that payment details were stored separately from user details, meaning that they were not compromised. This did not prevent the backlash that the company received for poor communication with users.
Possibly the second largest known data breach came from The FriendFinder Network and its multiple sites with the most notable being Adult Friend Finder. This incident occurred in 2016, where over 400 million accounts had been compromised and copious amounts of sensitive information were obtained by the hackers. The accounts were not protected well, with Adult Friend Finder using an algorithm known to be fairly weak. Overall, it is reported that the hackers had managed to gather around 15-20 years of data stored on this network.
Once again, we are reminded to stay vigilant and particularly for big companies, it is important to keep up to data with new security solutions. Any software upgrades that are going to give further protection need to be embraced, because hackers will always find a new way. Be sure to check out the following infographic from Lookout, which shows everything you need to know regarding cyber-attacks.
