Last year some pretty big companies managed to lose some pretty astonishing amounts of data to hackers. Even scarier is the thought that in some cases the actual loss might have occurred years ago. Which means there could be hackers out there, stealing data right now, whilst the database owners are blissfully unaware.
Yahoo!
In a December statement Yahoo! admitted it had only realised it had lost data when it analysed files presented to it in November. Almost 1 billion accounts are estimated to have been compromised in this breach. The news came only a few months after a similar announcement in September where 500 million accounts were affected. The data was taken in 2013 or 2014 and affected accounts were alerted as soon as Yahoo! could.
Almost 32 million Twitter usernames and passwords are estimated to be for sale on the dark web.
They knew 6.5 million accounts had been stolen in 2012 but it became apparent in May 2016 that many more had been taken when a dataset containing 117 sets of login details was posted for sale on the dark web.
Dropbox
Again the original leak dates back to 2012 but there are an astounding 5GB of files containing account details for Dropbox accounts. Dropbox had reported the breach but had not, until now, mentioned how many accounts were affected.
Tumblr
A stupendous total of 65.5 million Tumblr accounts have been breached with some of the data loss dating back to 2013.
Healthcare
It’s not just your email, social networking and file sharing that are at risk. In the US your medical records could have been stolen in a series of attacks across the nation, the biggest of which involved a staggering 3.7 million patient records, possibly including sensitive personal information that could be used in identity theft.
Government
You would have thought governments would know something about keeping secrets but it seems that some can’t. The entire Mexican voter database, 93.4 million records, was stolen in 2016. The state of Louisiana lost almost 3 million voter, police and DMV records. Still in US the IRS reported an attack involving 464,000 unauthorized social security numbers in addition to a possible 790,000 taxpayers involved in a 2015 hack.
Although these datasets are old surprisingly they still contain valuable passwords that haven’t been changed or work for other accounts. Here at MEEM, we urge you to keep yourself safe online. Change your passwords frequently and don’t reuse them. This will lower the risk of your personal details being compromised online.
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