Top Hacks and Cybersecurity Breaches of 2018
Aadhar
The Aadhar data breach affected 1.1 billion people. The Indian government’s ID database keeps a record of the citizen’s identity and biometric info. The database suffered a major leak in which the private information of Indian residents, including their names, bank account information, and ID numbers, was stolen. The data leak surfaced on a system run by the utility company Indane. The company hadn’t secured their API.
The exact date of the data breach could not be determined, but the breach was discovered in March of 2018.
Marriott Starwood Hotels
500 million people suffered at the hands of this data breach. The guest information included email addresses, passport numbers, reservation dates and phone numbers along with payment card numbers and their expiration dates. The hackers were able to gain access to the reservation database of Marriott Starwood Hotels. After that, they copied and stole all the information. This all started in 2014 but the breach wasn’t discovered until September 2018.
Exactis
The Exactis data breach affected 340 million people. The company compiles data on millions of people and businesses, and the data includes everything from their personal information, phone numbers, and addresses to interests and specific characteristics.
The data breach occurred in June 2018 and was discovered when a security expert came across a publicly accessible database that had almost every US citizen in it. It still remains vague whether any hacker was able to access that information or not.
Quora
The account information of 100 million people was compromised. It included names, emails addresses and encrypted passwords, users’ public questions and answers, and the data from the accounts linked to Quora. The data breach was carried out by a malicious third-party that accessed one of Quora’s systems. It was discovered in November 2018.
MyHeritage
92 million people were affected from this data breach in which email addresses, along with encrypted passwords of the signed-up users, were stolen and put on a private server outside the company. The data breach occurred in October 2017.
Cambridge Analytica
87 million people suffered because of the Cambridge Analytica data leak in which Facebook profiles and other data that assists in identifying users’ interests and preferences were stolen. The breach occurred in 2015.
Here is what happened: A professor from the University of Cambridge developed a personality prediction app called thisisyourdigitallife. The app passed user information to third parties, including Cambridge Analytica. This is the same firm that helped the presidential campaign of Donald Trump via targeted ads creation while using the voter data of millions of people.
Although only 270,000 Facebook users installed the app on their phones, because of the former data-sharing policies of Facebook, the app was able to collect data on millions of their friends as well.
Google
The Google data breach affected 52.5 million users, leaking the private information on their Google+ profiles, including their name, email address, date of birth, age, relationship status, employer and job title. The breach occurred from 2015 till March 2018 and then from November 7 to 13.
At the beginning of the year, Google made it public that it would shut down Google+ after a report from Wall Street Journal surfaced exposing a software glitch that led Google to reveal the personal profile data of 500,000 Google+ users. Later, in December, Google again announced that it had suffered another data breach that affected 52.5 million users. Google has now decided to shut down Google+ permanently in April 2019.