The 5 Largest Hacks of 2016

Each year, hackers attack an enormous amount of companies. These data breaches can be extremely costly for businesses. A report sponsored by IBM claimed data breaches on average cost a company $4 million. Last year companies faced some of the largest hacks and data breaches on record. Here is a review of the top data breaches of 2016:

1)  Panama Papers

Early last year, the Panama Papers caused a big stir. The Mossack Fonseca hack exposed many high profile people. Iceland’s former Prime Minister, Sigmund Davio Gunnlaugsson was deeply affected by the hack. Due to the scandal, Mr. Gunnlaugsson had to step down from his office. The Panama Papers also named other politicians, including the Argentinean President Mauricio Macri, Russian President Vladimir Putin, and Ukrainian President Petro Poroshenko.

2) Yahoo and Verizon

2016 was a tough year for Yahoo. Yahoo discovered that hackers released the personal info of billions of their users. During that time Yahoo was in the middle of making a billion dollar buyout deal with Verizon. Allegedly, Verizon is now delaying the buyout deal.

3)FBI

Another big hack involved the FBI. Hackers published the contact information of 20,000 FBI employees. The data contained names, titles, phone numbers, and email addresses. The hackers claimed they obtained the information by hacking into the Department of Justice database.

4) Linkedin

In May of 2016, Linkedin was hacked. The hacker allegedly posted over 500 million LinkedIn accounts. Reportedly, the data included usernames, passwords, and emails.

5) Dropbox

The online publication, Motherboard, was the first to announce a hack that happened to Dropbox. Motherboard claimed the hackers accessed 68 million records from the file sharing platform. Although the breach happened in 2012 the Dropbox team wasn’t aware of the scale of the intrusion until 2016. Dropbox later reset its user’s passwords to keep their data safe.