By Cyberspace has faced numerous minor and major data breaches round the year back in 2018. Among all such breaches, we are discussing five of the major ones that have affected a lot to the big giant companies and the users of the companies as well.
1.1 Billion Records of Indian Citizens were Stolen in Aadhaar Data Breach
Massive citizen database of India suffered a major breach last year which possessed over one billion personal data of Indian citizens. The database also included biometric information such as iris scans and fingerprints along with demographic information. The threat actor affected which was capable to access any registered demographics of a citizen after it allotted admin access by an unidentified individual. At that time, a reporter was provided with the administrator ID and password soon after contacting the unidentified individual through WhatsApp and moving what amounted just less than eight dollars. After the performed activity, the reporter easily got access to plug in any public Aadhaar number and acquire their names, addresses, phone numbers, email ids, postal codes, and images.
Incident of 500 Million Starwood Guest Reservation Database
One of the major breaches of the previous year was spotted when about 500 million guests of Starwood Reservation Database suffered the threat. Marriott has tried identifying all the duplicate information present in their database. They stated that the threat affected the database containing about 500 million guests who made a reservation at a Starwood property. The details of about 327 million guests contain some combination of customer names, gender, mailing addresses, telephone numbers, date of birth, email ids, passport numbers, reservation dates, arrival dates, departure dates, and communication preferences.
Exactis Database Exposed 340 Million Records of User Data
Security analyst discovered the sever breach last year in June, asserting that Exactis exposed the personal data of about 340 million users by saving the records on a openly accessible server. According to news report, about two terabytes data have been revealed in the declared breach. National law firm Morgan & Morgan filed a class activity lawsuit against Exactis. The lawsuit primes out to support customers’ personal data were revealed in the breach by retrieving monetary harms and other assistance. Exactis has not so far reacted to the breach accusations leaving quite many questions opened. At that moment, it was unsure if the revealed data had been accessed by attackers.
Nearly 200 Million Records Were Stolen from Apollo in Data Breach
A major database of about 200 million records was stolen from Apollo in an attempt of a cyberattack. The compromised data was said to be containing only private information. A predictive sales engagement and prospecting startup followed a data breach incident. The revealed data info included the names, email ids, company names, and different business contact details likely media holds, job titles and telephone numbers. The stolen database records of Apollo did not include any sensitive customer data likely bank details, passwords, and social security numbers according to the press release given by the spokesperson.
Approx. 120 Million Facebook Accounts Faced Breach
Another major breach was faced last year when 120 million Facebook accounts were suffered. While Facebook entirely blamed on the browser’s add-ons that become the reason to the breach. The accuser tried to sell 81,000 stolen Facebook accounts private messages and offered a sale price of 10 cents (8p) per account with FBSaler. The seller of the hijacked personal data initially promoted the bounty on the underground BlackHatWorld forum. Besides the illegal activity, FBSaler also published the personal information of the accounts from another 176,000 accounts, along with the extra set of information including email addresses and phone numbers of the Facebook users.
