16 Years of Data Breaches

Key

Data involved in breaches has been divided in three categories:

• cause of breach (marker color)
• corporations’ industry or field (ring dash style)
• type of lost information (marker icon)

The 2011–2016 cluster

A high concentration of data breaches can be seen between the years 2011 and 2016. Over one half of the analyzed breaches occured in this time period. The losses range from relatively small (3.9 million health records from Medical Informatics Engineering taken through hacking in 2015) to relatively large (around 412 million people’s accounts from Friend Finder Networks taken due to poor security in 2016). The most sought after type of data appears to be online information, personal details and email passwords.

Grand Theft Yahoo

In mid 2013, the American web services provider Yahoo! Inc. suffered a security breach that exposed all 3 billion of its users in the largest recorded data breach to date. The hackers made off with names, email addresses, dates of birth, phone numbers and passwords that were encrypted with an insecure method that was easy to crack. Yahoo suffered another breach in late 2014 that involved 500 million accounts.