As 2019 comes to an end, we are going to look back at some of the biggest cybersecurity data breaches! With new advancements in technology coming out daily, security and cybersecurity awareness should be at an all-time high. Hackers go after companies big or small, one location or 20, and even personal devices. Here are three examples of well-known companies who went through data breaches in 2019.
First, let’s start with a well-known company, Facebook! In April 2019, Facebook had more than 540 million records exposed. With a company as big as Facebook, their security should be top-notch right? Wrong. Facebook has a publicly accessible server hosted by a third party, which is where the 540 million Facebook user IDs, account names, likes, and comments were exposed. Luckily, the information that was exposed was public and not Usernames and Passwords.
What’s in your wallet? One of the biggest data breaches in history happened earlier this year to Capital One. A hacker by the name of Paige Thompson infiltrated the servers of a third-party cloud computing company that was contracted by Capital One. The biggest category of information that was breached during this hack was information routinely collected by any credit card company when receiving credit card applications from consumers, such as names, addresses, ZIP codes, phone numbers, email addresses, birthdates, and self-reported income. In some cases, customer credit scores, credit limits, balances, payment history, along with roughly 140,000 Social Security Numbers of potential Capital One credit card customers. This breach also had an estimated cost of 100 to 150 million dollars for Captial One.
The latest craze in the food industry, getting food delivered to your door through apps such as DoorDash! Did you know they had a breach in May with potentially 4.9 million users affected? Users’ information such as names, email addresses, delivery addresses, and phone numbers were exposed to an unauthorized third party. If you think you could have been one of the ones exposed, reset or change your password!
Data breaches have run at a record pace in 2019 with over 4 billion records breached in just the first 6 months with the majority of the breaches reported moderate to low severity score, exposing 10,000 or fewer records. The average cyber-criminal doesn’t dig too deep and scrapes up any data exposed by running automated online scripts looking for unsecured databases. The big breaches are the ones that make the headlines, but the smaller, everyday incidents make the money for most threat actors out there.
What is your company doing to protect its precious data? Make your New Year’s resolution to be focusing more on cybersecurity and data protection. Start with a risk assessment. This will help you better understand where your weaknesses are and how to address them.
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