Over the decade there have been attacks on the sites who declare to be the most secured domains on the web. Some of these are networking and email sites while others are core commercial banking and payment websites like Heartland and CardSystems which you had entrusted all your confidential data in.
Let us know about the most dreadful online security breaches of all times.
11. Twitter
Date: May 7 2012
Impact: 58978 user ids and passwords were stolen
An undefined agency dumped thousands of twitter account ids and passwords on a file storing site called Pastebin. Twitter covered up saying that most of these accounts were spams and fake accounts.
10. Gawker
Date: December 2010
Impact: 1.3 Million Ids and Passwords stolen
In December 2010 a hacking community that called themselves Gnosis had invaded the Gawker network to acquire more than a million passwords and gained access to the original source code of the network. Gawker did not hide the breach and immediately informed its user to change their credential while it was acting on the incident.
9. AOL
Date: August 6 2006
Impact: Shopping and Bank data stolen from 650,000 users
This was not even a breach. This is what TechCrunch calls “utter stupidity”. A text file was released by the head of AOL’s research department, Dr. Arbdur Chowdhary. Somehow the file got public and data of users across AOL network were flying around on the web.
8. Monster.com
Date: August 2007
Impact: 1.3 Million user information stolen
A group of hackers who had set up their server in Ukraine had breached into the most popular job recruitment site in US, allegedly by using High Profile user ids. The hackers generated spam and published them to other users to collect financial information. The hackers even blackmailed the user by installing viruses on their PCs and threatening them to completely format the systems if not paid.
7. Card System Solutions
date: June 17 2005
Impact: 40,000 Card details stolen
The hackers sneaked into the company’s server using a Trojan SQL query. The tool inserted a code into the browser every four days and stole the card details of thousands of users. This came as a waking call for the company as they had not implemented any encryption on the user details.
6. RSA Security
Date: March 17 2011
Impact: 40 thousand employee information stolen
An anonymous phishing mail called 2011 Recruitment Plan was sent to many employees. The mail breached the adobe flash player of the PC and installed a Trojan called Poison Ivy Rat that gave the remote access of the PC to the hackers.
5. TJX Inc.
Date: December 2006
Impact: 94 million credit cards exposed
The company did not have any firewall installed in the network. This allowed the hackers to steal about hundred million credit card details by toying with an in store kiosk that lets the users apply for jobs.
4. Play Station Network
Date: April 20, 2011
Impact: 77 million Playstation Network accounts hacked
Sony took responsibility of having conceded the biggest security breach of all times in which over 77 million accounts were hacked exposing millions of account ids and passwords including thousands of credit card details. All this while we thought the launch of PS3 was the worst thing that happened to Sony.
3. Heartland Payment Systems
Date: March 2008
Impact: 134 million credit cards exposed
Hackers monitored transactions of credit card accounts by running an SQL injection on the HPS site. They stole more than 134 million card details along with login ids and passwords. Heartland discovered two Russian intruders were scanning its corporate network a few months after the breach started.
2. Acxiom
Date: Aug. 8, 2003
Impact: 1.6 billion customer records hacked
A hack initiated by Scott Levine broke into Axciom network and over 1.6 billion customer records were stolen and 8.2 gigabytes of personal data had been downloaded with the span of a year. The incident caused a $7 million of damage and Scott was sentenced eight years in prison.
1. Epsilon
Date: March 30, 2011
Impact: To Be Determined
The names and e-mails of customers that were stored in over 108 retail stores, plus several huge financial firms like CitiGroup Inc. and the non-profit educational organization, College Board, were exposed after an unknown attacker hacked into Epsilon's systems. The estimated loss incurred by epslon is about $4 Billion.