Hacker attacks that have made history
One cyberattack of cloud service providers and its customers is capable of forcing the global economy to lose $ 4.6 billion. According to Lloyd’s of London Insurance Market Research, in 2016 companies lost $ 450 billion alone as the result of hacker attacks. In 2017, one of them, namely the Petya.A virus, was not bypassed by Ukraine. 75.24% of all attacks occurred on the network of organizations and state structures.
Among the victims were:
● “Boryspil” airport;;
● “Ukrzaliznytsia”:
● “Ukrposhta”;
● banks: “Oschadbank”, “Ukrgasbank”, “Pivdenny”, “OTP”;
● Kyivstar, Lifecell and Vodafone mobile operators;
● the number of government organizations, including the Cabinet of Ministers of Ukraine, Kyiv and Lviv City Councils.
The virus has hit 60 countries and caused losses of about $ 8 billion. We understand that this is only the approximate figure, since true losses are very difficult to calculate.
We have prepared the compilation of high-profile hacker attacks in world history
1. 2015, Ashley Madison
Since 2002, a dating service has been launched in Canada to target married people. The main idea was broadcast in the slogan: “Life is short. Get a romance on the side”. Over 13 years of activity, the service has garnered 40 million customers from around the world. Therefore, they became a welcome piece for The Impact Team. They broke the user’s personal data base and after that, this data began to appear on various sites and forums. This was the result of a huge number of divorces and several suicides.
2. 2014, Home Depot
Home Depot is American trading network that hackers have successfully cracked due to the vulnerability of Microsoft Windows. Microsoft responded very quickly and released a patch that should have closed the vulnerability but hackers have already managed to steal 56 million payment cards. Losses are very difficult to calculate, but this is the most notable cyber attack story that came about because of the weak spot in the operating system.
3. 2014, eBay
Everyone knows about eBay but even worldwide popularity will not save them from cyber attacks, even attracts intruders. It happened in summer of 2014. Data on 145 million users was not in the wrong hands, but fortunately, financial information leaks were avoided. The effects were felt by about one million buyers, having lost their personal data which should have been securely password protected.
4. 2013, Spamhaus
Spamhaus is the service that monitors spammers and hackers and blacklists them, was the victim of the DDOS attack. This attack became so global that the Internet slowed, and in some countries disappeared for a few hours. It was kind of a manifesto because this service enabled ISPs to block spam sources and protect their clients from certain “surprises”.
5. 2011, Sony Playstation
Information (contacts, logins, passwords) about 77 million Sony Playstation players has hit the Internet. The company claimed that credit card information was not stolen, however, they had to stop work for several days to patch holes in the security system. The company’s reputation has been badly damaged, even though the information was never used by hackers. In 2014, another attack resulted in stolen copies of unreleased movies and producers’ correspondence.
6. 2010, Stuxnet Worm
The virus was jointly developed by US and Israeli special services to stop the nuclear program of Iran. After infecting Iranian scientists’ computers, Stuxnet gained control of most of the centrifuges and made changes to their work. The Iranians did not immediately realize that someone had reached out to them and they just thought their research was going in the wrong direction.
7. 1999, Melissa
David Smith has developed the virus that could harm computers on behalf of Windows. The virus looked like the attachment marked “Important Message”. Clicking on the attachment, the virus has activated and modified important system files. Up to 20% of computers were infected.
The Melissa virus still walks the net, and not just it. How to recognize the virus, how to increase the security of Your personal data?
Get answers to these and other questions in the course “Information security”. Take the time to improve Your security system now so You don’t have to spend a lot of time and money to deal with the consequences.
