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Almost from the moment the Internet was born, private people, organisations and even countries were trying to extract the information flowing through the web and use it for their good. And as the use of the internet grew and became humanity’s primary way of communicating – so did the technologies used to “hack” into it.
Today, companies and countries invest vast amounts of money and afford to protect themselves from cyber threats and cyber-attacks, but unfortunately, it doesn’t always work. The cost of cybercrimes is expected to reach 10.5 trillion USD by 2025.
Here are some of the most notorious cyber-attacks of the past decade:
• Adobe Cyber Attack (2013) – At the beginning, the cyber-attack was thought to breach the information of almost 3 million users but ended up compromising the private information of nearly 40 million users worldwide. Adobe has also announced that the hackers stole parts of the source code to Photoshop, its popular picture-editing program. The company claimed at the time that only the passwords and credit card information of the first 3 million users were compromised, and the remaining users suffered “just” the loss of their passwords and IDs.
• The Cyber Attack on Yahoo (2014) – Yahoo witnessed one of the most significant cyberattacks when 500M accounts were compromised. However, it is reported that basic information and passwords were stolen, whereas bank information was not.
• WannaCry Ransomware Cyber Attack (2017) – One of the biggest ransomware of all time occurred when around 200,000 computers were affected in more than 150 countries. This outbreak had a massive impact across several industries and had a global cost of about 6 billion GBP.
• Facebook leaked users’ data (2021) – In this attack, the exposed data of over 500 million users of the giant social media company was leaked and posted in a hacking forum. According to INSIDER magazine, the exposed data includes the personal information of over 533 million Facebook users from 106 countries, including over 32 million records on users in the US, 11 million users in the UK, and 6 million users in India. It includes their phone numbers, Facebook IDs, full names, locations, birthdates, bios, and, in some cases, email addresses. https://www.businessinsider.com/stolen-data-of-533-million-facebook-users-leaked-online-2021-4
• “RocYou2021” Password Leak (2022) – This cybercrime is considered to be the most significant password leak of all time (to date). A forum user posted a massive 100GB TXT file containing 8.4 billion passwords, presumably combined from previous data leaks and breaches. This leak can potentially reach millions of people and organisations, considering the fact that most people reuse the same password on multiple platforms, apps, and websites.
