Top 10 Cyber Attacks:

Many thrilling breaking news of severe cyber attacks that cause billions of loss, often hit our news channels and sites. Following are the top 10 biggest cyber attacks of the history:

1.     Cyber attack on US Federal Government data breach:

On 12 December, 2020 US Federal Government acknowledged that a major cyber attack by a group accessed multiple parts of US federal Government, leading to a data breach. The Russian hacker group Cozy Bear APT29 was identified as the cyber attacker. The cyber attack was reported to be among the disaster cyber spying (obtaining secrets without permission of the holder), ever loss by the US, and due to the long duration (six to nine month) in which the hackers had access. During these days of discovery, at least 200 Organizations around the world had been reported to be effected by the attack, and some of these also loss data breaches.

The attackers exploited software from at least three US firms: Solar winds, Microsoft and VMware. A Supply chain attacked on SolarWinds’s Orion Software provided the initial entry point that is widely used in Government and industry. With VMware products and flaws in Microsoft, attackers can access emails and other documents and allow the attackers to log in with a single ID and password to any of several  related, yet independent, software systems.

2.     South Korean nightmare:

In 2013 South Korea cyber attack caused a big loss. In this attack data from 100 million credit cards had been stolen and 20 million bank accounts had also been hacked. With the fear of having their bank accounts emptied, millions of South Koreans had their credit cards blocked or replaced. Behind this theft was an employee of the Korea Credit Bureau (KCB), a solvency company. As a consultant he stole personal information of credit card companies’ customers, when he worked for them by simply copying the data to an external hard drive.

3.     Equifax:

An American credit company Equifax revealed that it had hit by a cyber attack over the course of a number of months. It was detected in July, 2017. The data breached included names, home addresses, phone numbers, and dates of birth, social security numbers and driver’s license numbers of 143 million American, Canadian and British customers as well as 200,000 credit card numbers. According to the nine-count indictment handed down by the grand jury in Atlanta, four members of the Chinese people’s Liberation Army are alleged to have conspired to hack Equifax as computer systems and commit economic espionage.

4.     Attack on more than one billion passwords:

IT security company Hold Security revealed in August 2014 that Russian hackers had stolen 1.2 billion logins, passwords and hundreds of millions of corresponding email addresses and 420,000 websites are reported to be affected  around the world. And this could potentially have allowed the group of hackers “CyberVor” to access 500 million email accounts. To visit sites and perform Vulnerability test in order to exploit SQL injection vulnerabilities and access databases, hacker used programmed Botnets. The data breach was first reported by the New York Times after being allegedly discovered and reported by Milwaukee-based information security company “Hold security”.

5.     Yahoo! Data breaches:

According to records, Yahoo internet service company was subject to the largest data breach. During the second half of 2016, two major data breaches of user account data were revealed to hackers. Firstly in 2014, Yahoo announced that it had been affected by a cyber attack that lost 500 million user accounts constituting the largest massive hacking of individual data directed against a single company. But in later Yahoo confirmed in October 2017 that all three billions users of  his accounts were impacted, include names, email addresses, telephone numbers, encrypted or unencrypted security questions and answers, dates of birth and hashed passwords were stolen.

6.     Marriot Hotels hacked:

In November 2018, hotel Giant Marriot revealed that it had been suffered by one of the largest data breaches, personal information from up to 500 million guests at the Marriott- Owned Starwood hotel group has been compromised, including banking data. After that Marriott announced that it had once again been hit, with up to 5.2 million guests at risk. Their personal information was hacked. Information accessed includes payment information, names, mailing addresses, phone numbers, passport numbers and even details about the Starwood preferred guest (SPG) account, a high end card launched by the American express credit card issuer for regular travelers. Marriott faced $123 million fine by UK authorities over this breach.

7.     Sony Hacked:

Sony’s play station network was attacked in April 2011. The personal data of 77 million users was hacked that contained multiplayer gaming services, online gaming purchasing and live content distribution of the Japanese brand. Banking details of thousand of players were also hacked. To appease their users, Sony paid 15 million dollars in compensation and also a few million dollars in legal fees in addition to refunding the people whose bank accounts had been illegally used. Indeed, hackers used a well-known network Vulnerability that Sony chose to ignore.

Through this data was unencrypted and could easily bi hijacked, unfortunately in 2014 Sony face a big attack. The personal data of 47000 employs (their all information) was stolen. The “Guardian of peace “stole Sony pictures entertainment by malware and 100 terabytes of data including large quantities of confidential information such as film script.

8.     Albert Gonzalez:

An American computer hacker and computer criminal who was responsible for one of the biggest hacking cases in US history. Gonzalez stole tens of millions of credit cards and debit cards numbers from over 250 financial institutions. He had hacked 180 million payment card networks from companies including OfficeMax, Dave and Buster’s and Boston Market. On March 25, 2010 Gonzalez was sentenced to 20 years in federal prison.

9.     Phone lines blocked to win Porsche:

The American hacker Kevin Poulsen is famous for his hacking work into the Los Angeles phone system in a bid to win a Ferrari in a radio competition. So when a local radio station offered a Porsche 944 S2 to the 102nd caller the inevitable happened. Poulsen guaranteed his success as he took control of the phone network and effectively blocked incoming calls to all the radio station numbers. Then of course he won the Porsche, but soon after, he was caught and had sent to prison for 5 years. After that Poulsen changed himself from black hat hacker to white hat hacker. Then he became a senior editor for IT security publication, wired news.

10.            Mafia Boy:

In 2000, 15 years old Michael Calce, also known as “Mafia Boy “ discovered how to take over networks when he was just a Canadian high school student. Calce used their combined resources to disrupt the number-one search engine at the time: yahoo just in one week, he had also brought down Dell, eBay, CNN and Amazon using a Distributed Denial of Service (DDOS) attack that overwhelmed corporate servers and caused their websites to crash. According to industry experts estimation the attacks resulted in a $1.2 billion loss.