The rising trend in data breaches continues to angle upwards, and as a result, there has never been a more precarious time in history to launch and maintain a successful business. To prevent the repetition of mistakes that result in data theft, we’ve compiled a list of the 56 biggest data breaches in history, including recent data breaches in 2021. Click on the table of contents dropdown above for a list of all the companies in this post.
Year after year, cyberattackers cause unnecessary stress for organizations, disrupting innovation and impacting profit. 2020 was no different – last year brought a bevy of damaging breaches that cost organizations precious money and time they couldn’t get back. Ranging from thousands to billions of records exposed, breaches big and small gave threat actors access to sensitive information like email addresses, locations, passwords, dates of birth, and more.
The personal information of over 500 million Facebook users has been published on a hacker forum on the dark web. To put the impact into perspective, in 2019, the population of the entire United States was 328.2 million. This data was stolen in 2019 after a vulnerability in Facebook’s ‘Add Friend” function was exploited.
You’ve just been breached. What do you do next? Depending on personality, preparation, and ability under crisis, there are a variety of responses to choose from, some effective and some not. Hopefully, you’re the rare breed who plans in advance how to respond. Even better if this planning includes how to prevent them. But to execute a logical, effective response, keep reading.
A typical organization’s environment consists of a myriad of applications and services, each with its own unique set of ongoing vulnerabilities and flaws that could ultimately lead to a data breach. This can make IT security and operations’ job difficult, as different departments and groups within a company may utilize specific software offerings to accomplish their job functions.
Cybercriminals are surprisingly lazy. Hackers are continuously cultivating their methods to achieve maximum impact with minimal effort. The adoption of a Ransomware-as-a-Service model is one example of such an achievement. But perhaps the apical point of cyberattack efficiency was achieved with the invention of the supply chain attack. A supply chain attack is a type of cyberattack where an organization is breached though vulnerabilities in its supply chain.
Leaky cloud services are a major concern these days. As more and more organizations move their data and applications to the cloud, ensuring new forms of collaboration and agility for their workforce, setup errors and misconfigurations (or even the lack of understanding of the shared responsibility model) pose a serious risk for the new, enlarged corporate perimeter. So far, in 2021, I have collected 12 major breaches fueled by cloud misconfigurations, and I wonder how many flew under the radar.
Last year, Verizon’s data breaches report showed that “human error” was the only factor with year-over-year increases in reported incidents. The average cost of data breaches from human error stands at $3.33 million, according to IBM’s Cost of a Data Breach Report 2020. Even big companies and government entities have fallen victim to data breaches caused by human error.
Conducting a data protection impact assessment (DPIA) or privacy impact assessment (PIA) is a complex and challenging task. Nevertheless, it’s critical to do. Data privacy concerns have become a significant focus across all industries, and for good reason: data is at higher risk than ever before. In its 2020 Q3 Data Breach QuickView Report, Risk Based Security revealed that 36 billion records were exposed during the first three quarters of 2020.
Data leaks don’t get as much press as data breaches — but they can be just as devastating to your business. In this article, you’ll learn how data leaks happen and the key steps to take to defend your organization.
