Top 5 Biggest Data Breaches of the 21st Century.

A Data Breach is a confirmed incident in which sensitive, confidential, or otherwise protected data has been accessed and/or disclosed in an unauthorized fashion. Data breaches may involve personal health information (PHI), personally identifiable information (PII), trade secrets, or intellectual property.

When I started writing this article on the data privacy of people in this world, I was surprised to come across many data breaches in the past. We are living in a society where all think money is supreme power but not exactly in this 21st century but data, yes the information of individuals is more vulnerable and unfortunately, no one is noticing it. Many people will receive calls from total strangers and they ask you about credit cards, donations, some calls are about advertising their businesses, and many more. Did you ever think one second that how these guys get your mobile number? I repeat your personal mobile number? The majority of the people won’t even get the thought in their daily routine but think about it at least right from now and start asking questions. If you get a call from a stranger to talk about their business or it might be some other things, just question them “Where did you get the mobile number?” and hear their improper reply. Most probably as soon as they hear you asking that, they cut the conversation and never lift the call even you call back. Did you ever think that it is a huge risk? Because they have your personal mobile number and they can do anything with that. Those people buy your numbers from internet sources but the hard truth is no one asks the right to have these details with them. In this digital world, there is more need to secure the data rather than becoming digitally active. There is no word of privacy, every permission you allow on your phone is a chance for the data breach. Here are the top personal data breaches that happened in the world and it’s pretty shocking to users.

1. Facebook

Date of Breach: April 2019.

Impact: More than 540 million records about Facebook users

Every child and adult have a Facebook account today and most of their day consumes time to spend inside Facebook, initially, it was developed for connecting people but today there are more people who are disconnected from living the real-life but searching for happiness with likes & comments.

More than 540 million records about Facebook users were publicly exposed on Amazon’s cloud computing service, according to a cybersecurity research firm. A report out Wednesday by UpGuard said two third-party Facebook app developers posted the records in plain sight, causing yet another major data breach for the world’s biggest social network.

According to UpGuard, a Mexico-based media company called Cultura Colectiva was responsible for the biggest leak. It exposed 146 gigabytes of Facebook user data, including account names, IDs, and details about comments and reactions to posts. It’s unclear how many individual users had data exposed. UpGuard said it alerted Cultura Colectiva and Amazon about the breaches from Cultura Colectiva in January, but no action was taken until Wednesday morning. After Bloomberg reached out to Facebook for a comment about that breach, an Amazon “storage bucket” with the data from Cultura Colectiva was secured.

2. Marriott International

Date of Breach: Septemeber 2018

Impact: Confidential Data of 500 million customers

At one level, the Marriott breach was potentially catastrophic: hundreds of millions of people had their passport and credit card numbers stolen, which could have disastrous personal impacts. The credit card number aspects are particularly worrying, and were made possible by yet another security failing on Marriott’s part: while the credit card numbers were stored in encrypted form, the encryption keys were stored on the same server and were also apparently scooped up in the breach. As for the passport numbers, while some were encrypted, the majority were simply saved in a clear format.

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3. Dubsmash

Date of Breach: December 2018

Impact: 162 million user accounts

In December 2018, New York-based video messaging service Dubsmash had 162 million email addresses, usernames, PBKDF2 password hashes, and other personal data such as dates of birth stolen, all of which were then put up for sale on the Dream Market dark web market the following December. The information was being sold as part of a collected dump also including the likes of MyFitnessPal (more on that below), MyHeritage (92 million), ShareThis, Armor Games, and dating app CoffeeMeetsBagel.

Dubsmash acknowledged the breach and sale of information had occurred and provided advice around password changing but failed to say how the attackers got in or confirm how many users were affected.

4. Adobe

Date of Breach: October 2013

Impact: 153 million user records

Originally reported in early October by security blogger Brian Krebs, it took weeks to figure out the scale of the breach and what is included. The company originally reported that hackers had stolen nearly 3 million encrypted customer credit card records, plus login data for an undetermined number of user accounts.

Later in the month, Adobe said the attackers had accessed IDs and encrypted passwords for 38 million “active users.” But Krebs reported that a file posted just days earlier, “appears to include more than 150 million usernames and hashed password pairs taken from Adobe.” After weeks of research, it eventually turned out, as well as the source code of several Adobe products, the hack had also exposed customer names, IDs, passwords, and debit and credit card information.

In August 2015, an agreement called for Adobe to pay a $1.1 million in legal fees and an undisclosed amount to users to settle claims of violating the Customer Records Act and unfair business practices. In November 2016, the amount paid to customers was reported at $1 million.

5. Zynga

Date of Breach: Septemeber 2019

Impact: 218 million user accounts

Once a giant of the Facebook gaming scene, Farmville creator Zynga is still one of the biggest players in the mobile game space with millions of players worldwide.

In September 2019, a Pakistani hacker who goes by the name Gnosticplayers claimed to have hacked into Zynga’s database of Draw Something and Words with Friends players and gained access to the 218 million accounts registered there. Zynga later confirmed that email addresses, salted SHA-1 hashed passwords, phone numbers, and user IDs for Facebook and Zynga accounts were stolen.

The above all are top data breaches that happened in the world without any knowledge of users unless it was out to the public. Along with technology, the chances of threats are also increasing day by day. It is our responsibility to look over what permissions you are allowing on a website, android apps, and anywhere. I hope this article helps you at some points where you can take care of your information and from now on if any stranger calls you just ask them how did they got your personal mobile number and make sure you hear their response because most of the guys won’t reveal it out unless you put your effort like questioning them that on what basis do they have permission to take your details. It is not only them but organizations that sell your data don’t have the right to make money out of your own data until you provide that permission to them, so be careful and check out every app's permission you provide and maintain individual online security. Question them, ask for your data no one is going to fight for your data and it is you to start asking strangers. Unfortunately, we cannot get back our privacy right today but we can maintain security and create awareness among friends & family to understand how important is your data.

Find Major Data Breaches in the world here: Data Breaches of All Time