With cybercrime increasing annually, according to Cybersecurity Ventures, the financial damages worldwide are said to be somewhere in the ballpark of $6 trillion annually by 2021 and looking at the numbers, it seems that corporations are seemingly fighting a losing battle.
Over 145.5 million Americans were put at risk in the most recent Equifax in breach of 2017. The same hack touched over 700,000 British consumers and 8,000 Canadians. These staggering numbers are enough to prompt the question: is anyone safe online? The more sophisticated hackers get, the harder security companies must fight back. Top10VPN put together a review of the biggest data breaches in 2017.
The beginning of 2017 saw over 1.5 million accounts from the E-Sports Entertainment Association hacked — containing personal information of the gaming community.
Not even government agencies seem to be safe from hackers as the list begins with the IRS data breach that saw 100,000 taxpayers’ information compromised in April of 2017. With over 8,000 fraudulent returns filed during the hack, it cost about $30 million overall.
Skipping forward to May, the users of one of the most popular email clients, Gmail, were the target of a phishing scam. The hack affected over 1 million users who were prompted to allow a phony third-party to manage their email account.
Viacom saw over 3 million private credentials and configuration files hacked in September because they were left on an unsecured Amazon server. Everything from popular show information (similar to the HBO hack that saw Game of Thrones scripts released) to employee information can be up for grabs when an entertainment conglomerate like this is put at risk.
Finally, in October 2017, Yahoo released a report about their 2013 breach. This stated that 3 billion user accounts were affected by that breach—which is every one of their users. You can see the full list in the infographic below.
What do you think of this infographic? What do you think the landscape of cybersecurity looks like in 2018? Let us know in the comments below, or on Google+, Twitter, or Facebook.
Last Updated on February 3, 2018.
