Data breach is the release of private, sensitive, and confidential information into a malicious and unsecured environment. Well, a data breach can occur accidentally or can be a result of deliberate action. Without any shadow of a doubt, millions of users get trapped in the vicious circle of data breaches every year. Right from the big giants to a small employee working in an organization, anyone can fall prey to data breaches.
Data breaches can hurt businesses and individuals in a variety of ways. They are a costly affair that can damage lives and cause serious harm to your reputation as well. You might have come across massive data breaches popping up on the internet. As technology comes a step ahead, more and more information has been moving to the digital horizon. As a consequence, cyberattacks have become common and people easily fall prey to them.
Corporates and businesses remain easy targets to cybercriminals because larger amounts of data can be seized in one fell swoop. Now, you might be eager to know why do breaches occur, right? Well, have a glimpse at how data breaches occur.
Which Vulnerabilities could result in a data breach?
Cybercrime is a profitable industry vertical for malicious attackers who want to steal sensitive information and the reputation of your business. Data breaches occur for a variety of reasons, including accidentally and targeted such as:
- System vulnerabilities due to outdated software
- Password as weak as a kitten
- Download from unknown sources i.e. malicious sites
- Targeted Malware Attacks
Well, apart from the ones mentioned above, there are other causes of a data breach that you need to be aware of.
It comes as no surprise that the pandemic has augmented the number of data breaches around the globe. Well, let’s take a glance at the worst data breaches that took place as of now.
5 Worst Cases of Data Breaches happened in 2021.
- LinkedIn Data Breach 2021
It took place in June 2021 and impacted 700 million users worldwide. The data examined by the website was not inclusive of login and financial credentials, but it included a wealth of private information that can be used for any malicious purposes. The wealthy information that was stolen during the breach included:
- Names
- Phone Numbers
- Physical and Email addresses
- LinkedIn username and profile URL
- Personal and Professional experience
- Gender
- Other social media accounts
- Geolocation records
- Bonobos Data Breach 2021
Men’s clothing e-commerce store suffered a massive data breach in January 2021, impacting 12.3 million people. The segregation of 12.3 million is as follows:
- 3.5 million partial credit card credentials
- 7 Million records related to the shipping address
- 1.8 million records related to account information
- Twitch Data Breach 2021
Twitch is an interactive live-streaming service, owned by Amazon suffered a data breach in October 2021 impacting 7 million users worldwide. More than 100 GB of data was leaked and posted online publicly.
The posted data included 3 years of payment information showing the amount of money Twitch compensated to its elite gamers.
- Pixlr Data Breach 2021
A hacker stole a database containing records of 1.9 million people. This data breach took place in January 2021. The exposed data included information related to:
- Usernames
- Country
- Passwords
- Email Addresses
- Graff data Breach 2021
Graff is an exclusive jeweler in the UK. It suffered a major data breach in November 2021 and impacted 1.1 million user records. Conti, the Russian cybercriminal group was entirely responsible for the attack that involved the deployment of the dangerous Ransomware.
After stealing the sensitive information, Conti started phishing some of the stolen records over the dark web, promising to put a halt to the Ransomware attack only on the condition of paying 10 pounds. Also, some of the high-profile customers including Donald Trump and David Beckham were impacted by this data breach.
Conclusion
Data breaches are here to stay, and the best defense against them is to take preventive measures such as keeping your software updated, installing firewalls in your system, avoiding oversharing on social media, and implementing high-quality security software such as Protegent complete security software.
