The Biggest Cybersecurity Crises In a Past Few Years and What May Be Coming Next

Over the last few years, a whole host of large-scale cyber attacks have taken their toll on businesses and individuals across the globe. From the 2019 Capital One data breach affecting over 100 million Americans to the widespread Facebook data breach occurring in the same year, it’s safe to say that cyber attacks have the potential to negatively impact countless numbers of people around the world.

Continue reading as VPNpro.com delves deeper into the biggest cybersecurity breaches in recent years and things that you should look out for in the years to come.

First American Financial Corp

Affecting a total of 885 million records, this attack which occurred in 2019 is undoubtedly one of the most widespread in the last few years. Exposing a series of social security numbers, bank transactions, and much more, the First American Financial Corp leak made a huge amount of private data publicly accessible. Caused by poor security, the records were eventually taken offline, but could be easily accessed even without authentication.

Yahoo

Back in 2013, a total of 3 billion Yahoo accounts were affected by a large-scale data breach which affected every user of the service. In the process, phone numbers, names, dates of birth, and other sensitive details found their way into the hands of online thieves. Just a year later, a separate attack went on to affect 500 million accounts – emphasising that Yahoo needed to take drastic action in order to prevent such an attack from occurring in the future.

Equifax

Exposing a total of 209,000 US credit card numbers in 2017, the Equifax data breach occurred after the systems of the company were compromised by hackers. Personal information accessed by hackers including birth dates, names, addresses, social security numbers, and some driver’s licence numbers. Two years down the line, a further 2.4 million US customers had their names and partial driver’s licence details stolen.

Facebook

Facebook boasts a staggering 2.3 billion users around the world and is by far the largest social network across the globe. However, almost 20% if its users were affected due to an unprotected database in which 419 million records were freely accessible to anyone who has an internet connection. Information accessed largely consisted of phone numbers, although some of the records also had information such as country, gender, and the name of the user. While this wasn’t in fact a hack, Facebook promptly acted to ensure that this database was no longer accessible.

Marriott International

Widely known hotel brand Marriott announced in November 2018 that cyber criminals had gained access to private data – affecting approximately 500 million users. Starting in 2014, the systems of Starwood-branded hotels were breached, only for Marriott to discover the flaws two years after acquiring Starwood back in 2016. Only limited data such as name and contact information were exposed for many customers. But, many others had other personal information accessed which included passport numbers, credit card numbers, and more.

Adult Friend Finder

October 2016 saw one of the largest cyber attacks in recent times occur. Affecting more than 412.2 million accounts on the FriendFinder network, over 20 years of private data was exposed by hackers, meaning that names and email addresses found their way into the public eye. Weak encryption that protected passwords also meant that almost 99 percent of them were cracked within less than a month.

eBay

Dating back to May 2014, worldwide online marketplace eBay reported that all its 145 million users had been compromised by an online attack which exposed encrypted passwords, dates of birth, names, and addresses. Using the credentials of three corporate employees, hackers were able to gain access to the user database for a total of 229 days. Thankfully, financial information wasn’t accessed as this was stored separately, but it was still very worrying for eBay users around the world.

PlayStation Network

Causing Sony to lose an estimated $171 million dollars over the course of a month while the site was down, the Playstation Network data breach of 2011 was said to have affected 77 million accounts. Allowing hackers to gain access to passwords, email, full names, home addresses, and much more, this was viewed as one of the worst cyber attacks in online gaming history.

Cybersecurity crises in 2020 and beyond

Given that the aforementioned data breaches have affected some of the biggest brands on the planet, it certainly wouldn’t be surprising to see similar large-scale online attacks occur in the near future. Taking this into consideration, it’s important that cybersecurity awareness remains a top priority for businesses across the globe.

Particularly in an age where the protection of data is of paramount importance – even more so after the introduction of GDPR, it’s clear that investment in cybersecurity needs to increase to allow businesses to keep online criminals at bay.

In recent times, artificial intelligence (AI) is being increasingly utilised in order to allow companies to be alerted to potential cyber attacks at the earliest opportunity, with as much as 61% of enterprises stating that they ‘cannot do without AI technologies’ when it comes to preventing data breaches.

However, the increased usage of cloud technologies, increased complexity of cyber attacks, and the continued use of inadequate cybersecurity processes means that those with enough time and resources at their disposal will continue to find vulnerabilities online. Especially considering the likes of Uber and Facebook have fallen victim to cybercrime in recent times, it won’t come as much of a surprise to see global companies such as these becoming affected by cyber attacks in the years to come.

Conclusion

With the increased sophistication of cyber attacks becoming even more of an issue, it’s clear that individuals and businesses alike need to step up their efforts in the fight against cybercrime. As you’ll now be aware, cyber attacks have affected millions of people in the past, and any future attacks are likely to do the same. For that reason, it’s important to lead the charge against the cybercriminals by remaining vigilant, keeping software up to date, and acting quickly should the worst happen.