Data security

10 Largest Data Breaches in 2018

Data breaches compromised the personal information of millions of people around the globe in 2018. Data breaches are security incidents in which information is accessed without authorization. They  can happen for a variety of reasons, e.g. hacking, data can be mishandled or sold to third parties, holes in a website’s security system, etc.

The data breach that caused the largest number of users affected was against India government ID database.

Here are the 10 biggest data breaches that were revealed this year, ranked by the number of users affected, according to businessinsider.com:

10. Facebook — 29 million

This breach affected highly sensitive data, including locations, contact details, relationship status, recent searches, and devices used to log in between July 2017 — September 2018.

“The hackers were able to exploit vulnerabilities in Facebook’s code to get their hands on ‘access tokens’ — essentially digital keys that give them full access to compromised users’ accounts.

9. Chegg — 40 million

Personal data including names, email addresses, shipping addresses, and account usernames and passwords were affected. An unauthorized party gained access to an American education company database that hosts user data, according to ZDNet...