The 5 Biggest Cyber Attacks in History

In the modern-day data-driven world, data breaches have become quite common. It is affecting billions of people across the world. Digital transformation has led to an increase in data collection. This, in turn, has led to data breaches.

Many people are making online transactions. In case they are not careful, they might become a victim of a cyberattack. For instance, when you are registering into an online casino to play some games, you have to make sure that the platform you are choosing is licensed and uses the right security measures. This ascertains that the details you are sharing with the site are well-protected. For this, you can check out the reviews. In case you decide to play in All Slots Casino for real money, make sure you read All Slots Casino review to find out what it has to offer.

Cybersecurity threats are getting more intense and sophisticated among the growing levels of remote work and reliability on digital services. Hackers tend to target critical data. Often, the attack targets individuals. However, it also targets big organizations. Many companies had to pay a ransom to get back access to the data that had been breached by the cybercriminals.

In this article, you will find out about the top 5 cyber-attacks in history that people are going to remember for years to come.

Google China

In 2009, Google China had suffered a series of cyberattacks. The attack was called Operation Aurora. It had stolen intellectual property from the organization. However, what’s worse is it had targeted 30 more companies for the targeted malware attack. Since it happened in China, the attack appeared to gain access to accounts of public activists from the country.

In 2010, Google made a press release stating the attack failed to achieve its objective. According to the press release, just 2 Gmail accounts had been accessed partially. All data breaches came through users who used the Internet Explorer browser. So, the Australian, German, and French governments had recommended its people to use some other browser.

However, the cyberattack caused Google to review its operations in China. This attack had eventually been traced down to 2 schools in China that had a partnership with the main search engine rival of Google in China.

PlayStation Network

In 2011, Sony accepted for the first time that some of the PlayStation Network functions were down. The network suffered a two-day cyberattack. This caused the online services to be affected for about a month. In another record attack, about 77 million accounts on PlayStation had been compromised for over 20 days.

Apart from this, 12,000 credit card details had been stolen. Thus, it turned out to be one of the largest internet security breaks. It caused Sony to answer to the United States House of Representatives. They had also been fined a million pounds for improper security measures by British Information Commissioners. The outage cost them about £140 million.

HeartBleed

This is an attack that happened during 2012-2014. Heartbleed was not a virus but a bug, which was written mistakenly into OpenSSL. It lets the hackers create a gateway into databases. People say that this is the biggest attack and some reports suggest that it impacted almost 17% of all sites.

Due to this attack, hackers were able to get access to private conversations. The users weren’t aware of this since they placed a gateway in the system so that they could get access any time they wanted. You will be surprised to know that the bug was present for 2 years before it was discovered. Google Security was finally able to detect it in 2014.

NASA and US Defense Department

In 1999, Johnathan James, a 15-year old teen, did something that gave him a permanent place in the hall of fame for the hackers. He was able to penetrate the US Department of Defense’s computer and installed a backdoor on the servers. So, he was able to intercept internal emails being sent by government organizations, including the ones that had usernames and passwords.

With the help of the stolen details, he stole a piece of NASA software that cost the organization $41,000 as systems had to be shut down for 3 weeks. James had later been caught. However, he had to serve less sentence time because of his young age.

Yahoo

In 2016, Yahoo had released a statement mentioning that around 500 million users noticed their data being stolen by cybercriminals. The attack was launched in 2014 and been made public in 2016. So, the company requested their users to change their passwords in case they had not done it since 2014. The data that the hackers had stolen were numbers, passwords, and personal details. However, the hackers didn’t steal credit card data.


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