Data Breaches are incidents in which cybercriminals gain access to confidential information through various malicious cyber techniques. The occurrence of data breaches has increased to a great extent these days. Various Data Breaches occurred in the year 2016.
Major Data Breaches
The major Data Breaches along with their brief description are as follows:
- Dropbox
Dropbox, a popular file-hosting service faced a data breach in 2012. Finally, in September 2016, it was revealed that the usernames and passwords of approximately 68 million Dropbox users were stolen in that data breach.
- Snapchat
In March, 700 current and former Snapchat employees lost their personal information when hackers used a phishing scam to trick an employee into sending them their private information. The attacker posed as the CEO of Snapchat and requested sensitive employee information such as names, SSNs, payroll data, etc.
- Yahoo
The Yahoo breach of data is one of the biggest Data Breaches in the history of data breaches. Yahoo lost 500 million usernames, passwords, dates of birth, security questions, etc. in a data breach which occurred in the year 2014. In addition, another data breach occurred in 2013 which was reported in December 2016. This data breach affected more than 1 billion user accounts!
- LinkedIn
The original data breach of the professional networking website, LinkedIn occurred in 2012. However, it was discovered in May 2016 that hackers were using and selling login credentials of 117 million LinkedIn users on the black market. The LinkedIn users who fell victim for this data breach also included Facebook founder Mark Zuckerberg.
- FriendFinder
FriendFinder, a popular adult dating and entertainment website fell for a data breach in November. The hack exposed data of more than 412 million user accounts. The exposed data included data of accounts that existed since 20 years. The data included information such as usernames, emails, passwords, etc.
Takeaway From All Above Data Breaches
- All the above Data Breaches have taught us that each and every company is at risk of data breach and theft.
- As hackers are getting smarter, companies need to take security very seriously. Every company should educate its employees on using best password security practices, setting two-factor authentication, and using a password manager.
- As our lives are becoming more and more online these days, it’s becoming very important that we take all the necessary steps to keep our information safe.
