Biggest Data Breaches in the last 5 years

Social Media Platforms Data Breaches

Recently occurred Facebook data compromise scandal has gotten everyone concerned about data security on Facebook and other social media platforms. However, there are many other brands that have been victims of cyber attack which lead to losing crucial and confidential user information. Here’s a list of the brands that made news due to their data breach.

Social Media Platforms Biggest Data Breaches
  1. JP Morgan Chase

Date: July 2014

Impact: 76 million households and 7 million small businesses

Details: One of the largest banks in the U.S became a victim of a high-profile cyberattack in July 2014. The breach compromised data like names, email addresses, and phone numbers. The attack impacted two-third of all American households. A couple of months later, four men were indicted for the attack on JP Morgan Chase as well as several other financial institutions with charges including securities and wire fraud, money laundering, and identity theft.

  1. Yahoo

Date: 2013-14

Impact: 3 billion user accounts

Details: In September 2016, the once dominant Internet giant went in negotiations to sell itself to Verizon. It had been the victim of the biggest data breach in history, in 2014. The attack lead to the compromise of details like the real names, email addresses, date of birth and telephone numbers of 500 million users. A couple of months later, in December, Yahoo updated that a breach in 2013, by a different group of hackers had compromised 1 billion accounts. This breach lead to a compromise of passwords, security questions and answers. In October of 2017, Yahoo revised that estimate, saying that, in fact, all 3 billion user accounts had been compromised.

  1. Target Stores

Date: December 2013

Impact: Upto 70 million records

Details: The breach started before Thanksgiving of 2013 and lasted for about a month. Target initially announced that the hackers had stolen 40 million credit and debit cards, but it later in January 2014 said that 70 million customers were affected.

  1. Anthem

Date: February 2015

Impact: 78.8 million customers

Details: Anthem, a health insurance company formerly known as WellPoint was shattered by a cyberattack in February 2015. This breach gave out very crucial information like SSNs, employment histories, date of birth. All this data was enough for crimes like identity theft and much more.

  1. Facebook

Date: March 2018

Impact: 87 million user accounts

Details: Facebook discovered in 2018 that the information of its users had been harvested in late 2015 but failed to alert users at the time. The information was collected through an app called, ‘This is your digital life’, built by the Cambridge University academic Aleksandr Kogan in collaboration with Cambridge Analytica. Hundreds of thousands of users were paid a fee to take a personality test and consented to have their data collected.  This data breach was believed to have influenced American Presidential Election 2016 which negatively impacted Facebook’s identity and place in the market. Facebook is still making amends to regain the trust of its users.

There are many more companies who were attacked by hackers and valuable customer information was easily compromised and misused. Comment and share if there are any other data breach details you think we should be sharing and we will roll out a Volume 2 of this article.