The Internet is awesome –there is no doubt in that. With a plethora of free, easy-to-access range of online services and information that you can avail on the Internet, the modern life pattern has become much simpler. However, with the advent of the revolutionary Internet technology, several security threats & breaches also keep us awake –most of the times. In the last couple of years, several major industry giants along with other small to medium-scale online enterprises have observed significant data breaches and hacking attacks.
Our data online is constantly under threat due to the frequently occurring data breaches and hacking attempts that are made on the Internet world. Here are some of the top, latest data breaches that made us realize the vulnerability of the Internet & its services:
- Aadhaar: With a whopping number of over 1.1 billion data records breached, the Aadhaar breaching was recorded on 3rd January, It came into light when in January, some reporters with the Tribune News Service paid some amount asking for the login credentials to a service that was being anonymously offered over WhatsApp. Using the particular service, the reporters were able to get access to any Aadhaar number –the 12-digit unique number used as a primary means of identification in India.
- Exactis: Exactis –a leading marketing & data aggregation firm in Florida recorded data breaching of around 340 million data records on 26th June, A security researcher discovered that the firm had left an important database exposed on the server that was publicly accessible. The database containing around 2TB of information like the personal details of millions of Americans as well as businesses was breached easily.
- Under Armour: It was on May 25th, 2018 that Under Armour came to know that some individual had gained unauthorized access to around 150 million data records from MyFitnessPal –a platform that was used for tracking the diet & exercise information about the users. CNBC released the reports that the criminals were responsible for breaching the usernames, addresses, hashed passwords, and much more.
- Facebook: No one can easily forget the major data scandal that took place on 17th March, 2018 on Facebook. The reporters were able to debug how a political data organization named Cambridge Analytica was able to collect personal information of around 87 million Facebook users via some app that scraped their personal information.
Know about some of the latest data breaches around the world!