Data breaches affecting too many people are far too common. In today's data-driven world, the cases of cyberattacks have scaled up. The attackers' aim varies from stealing individual information to confidential industrial product data. In most cases, the hackers take advantage of the vulnerabilities that exist in the operating system of the tech companies.
There is hardly any solid way to avoid cyberattacks. As technology keeps on evolving, cybercriminals are also updating their skills. Here are cyberattacks that rocked the biggest tech companies.
This incident occurred in April 2019, when 533 million users were affected. Two datasets from Facebook apps were exposed to the public internet. The information included phone numbers, Facebook IDs, and account names. After two years, the data was then posted for free, showing the real intent surrounding the attacker.
Due to the increased number of cyberattacks, there is a need for giant tech companies to use client collaboration software that will ensure secure file sharing. MangoShare from Mango Practice Management is one of the most secure file-sharing applications with rock-solid security features to protect the customer's data.
Yahoo
Yahoo attack happened in August 2013, and it affected 3 billion user accounts, but the company publicly revealed the incident in December 2016. At that time, the company was being acquired by Verizon when it announced that more than a billion of its customers' accounts had been accessed by a hacking group.
Despite this attack, the deal was completed at a lower price. Later, it was revealed that the attackers accessed the account information like security questions and answers, plain text passwords, and payment card details. The new CEO assured the users that they were committed to the highest standards of accountability and transparency.
In June 2021, it was estimated that about 700 million user accounts on LinkedIn were affected by the cyberattack. The data was posted on a dark web forum impacting more than 90% of its user base. A hacker going by the moniker "God User" used various scraping techniques to exploit the site's API before dumping the first information data set of around 500 million customers. Later, the information was added to the 700 million customer database.
While the official communication from the giant tech company argued that no sensitive, private personal data was exposed. The data posted on the dark web contained email addresses, phone numbers, genders, social media details and geolocation records.
Alibaba
Alibaba cyberattack happened in November 2019, whereby 1.1 billion pieces of user data were affected. It's argued that over eight months, a developer working for an affiliate marketer managed to scrap the customer data on the platform.
This includes mobile numbers and user names from the Alibaba Chinese shopping website, famously known as Taobao. He used crawler software he developed from scratch. The developer and the affiliate marketer collected the information for their use, and none of the information was sold on the black market. Both were sentenced to three years in prison.
Adobe
Adobe cyber attack accounts for about 153 million user accounts affected in October 2013. Early that month, the CEO reported that hackers had infiltrated their systems and stolen about 3 million encrypted customers' credit cards and login data or an undetermined number of user accounts. Later, the estimate increased to 38 million, including IDs and passwords for the active users.
A security blogger would post a file that included more than 150 million usernames and hashed password pairs taken from Adobe. In an agreement signed in August 2015, Adobe was called to pay $1.1 million in legal fees as an undisclosed amount to the affected user to settle claims of violating the Customer Records Act.
Expert