Cybersecurity Breaches in the News
Almost everyone has received a notice by postal mail or email warning them that a large company with which they do business has experienced a data breach and instructing them on what to do if they believe that their own data has been compromised. You might even have started to ignore these notices since none of these data breaches have resulted in the theft of your identity. Data breaches of big companies can be disastrous if the compromised information includes bank account numbers and social security numbers. They can be just as damaging to the company’s reputation if the compromised information is a little more than long-dormant usernames and account passwords.
You do not want either fate to befall your company, and if you doubt that it can happen to you, consider these the most significant corporate data breaches in history. The New York cybersecurity consultants at Perspective Omni Media can help you avoid a data breach like these famous companies have suffered.
The Yahoo Breach of 2013
The biggest data breach in the history of the Internet happened in 2013; Yahoo suffered a data breach that exposed the data of three billion users, more than half of the world’s Internet users. Worst of all, the public did not even know about the magnitude of this data breach until 2016, after the acquisition of Yahoo by Verizon was complete.
The Alibaba Breach of 2019
In 2019, the data breach at the Chinese e-commerce company Alibaba exposed the data of more than one billion accounts. The breach is believed to be the work of one person, an affiliate marketer who created a crawler software and used it to scrape customer data, such as usernames and phone numbers. He stole data from 1.1 billion user accounts over an eight-month period.
The LinkedIn Breach of 2021
In the summer of 2021, a hacker who operated under the name God User stole data from 700 LinkedIn accounts, meaning that approximately 90 percent of LinkedIn users had their data stolen. LinkedIn tried to downplay it by saying that it was just a violation of LinkedIn’s terms of service rather than a proper data breach. Meanwhile, the information that God User shared included people’s email addresses, phone numbers, and locations, so while it was not identity theft in itself, it was certainly valuable information to would-be identity thieves.
The Facebook Breach of 2021
Facebook has been having image problems in the past few years, and the data breach it experienced in 2019 did not help. Hackers stole data from 530 million users; this data included account names, Facebook IDs, and phone numbers. To make matters worse, the hackers posted this data publicly in 2021, making it impossible for Facebook to claim that the data breach was not a big deal.
Don’t Be a Statistic
It’s great when your company makes front page news, but not when it is because the majority of your customers have had their data stolen because of your lack of cybersecurity. Contact Perspective Omni Media about preventing large-scale corporate data breaches.