DATA THE BIGGEST BREACHES OF THE 21ST CENTURY
Davey Winder examines the biggest data blunders of the century to date and the lessons we should learn from them
Data breaches have become so commonplace that to make the headlines, they need to be big – really big. But how do you measure size when it comes to a data breach?
The metric might be a dollar value that reflects the cost to the organisation in terms of investigation, brand damage, clearing up and even fines. Or how about the number of users involved or records compromised? For this feature, we decided to opt for the metric that we feel is most relevant to our real-world audience: impact.
We have considered what the impact has been on the organisation concerned, the users involved and the general cyber security landscape. By looking back at the mistakes that have been made, we offer advice on how to avoid repeating them in the future – and that advice is as relevant for the small business as it is to the multinational corporations.
As for our timeline of 21st century breaches, not a lot really happened during the first four years of the millennium – at least not as far as data theft was concerned. The year 2000 got off to an insecure start, though, with the ILOVEYOU worm (also known as the Love Letter or Love Bug) exploding across millions of Windows-powered computers in a matter of hours. The payload was a damaging rather than exfiltrating one: a VBScript overwriting random files on the local machine. More worms followed during the next couple of years and, in 2003, the Anonymous hacking collective was established.
But we have to wait until 2004 for the data breach mayhem to really start…