There’s no hiding from them, cyber attacks and data breaches are now commonplace. Year on year the frequency of cyber attacks increases with over 5 million records now breached every single day!

So what were the biggest data breaches of 2017? Here are the top 10. (Data taken from BreachLevelIndex.com)

10. Verizon/NICE Systems (14 Million Records Breached)

The American telecommunications company Verizon saw a reported 14 million of their customers have their data breached after a mistake by a third party company. Nice Systems that partner Verizon saw one of their servers breached due to a misconfigured security setting.

This security error allowed anybody with the correct information to download records with customers names, addresses, account numbers and more. Although it took over a week before the data was secured, Verizon claimed that no data was stolen

9. Zomato (17 Million Records Breached)

In May Zomato the restaurant search and discovery app saw 17 million user accounts breached.Zomato said the cybercriminals had obtained no financial information but, names, emails and hashed passwords got stolen.

To help counteract the damage of the attack, it logged affected users out of the application and forced password resets.

8. New Oriental (20 Million Records Breached)

In March New Oriental an Asian Educational Service saw 20 million items of data breached. A former marketing manager faces up to seven years in prison after selling personal contact information of students.

He confessed to Shanghai police that he’d sold information of students planning to study abroad and had access to 20 million records.

7. The National Health Service (NHS) (26 Million Records Breached)

In May 2017, the WannaCry ransomware swept across the world hitting 150 different countries. Locking users out of their accounts the attack saw the criminals demand a bitcoin payment of £300-£600 for the data to be recovered.

26 million records of patients across 2700 practices were reportedly breached causing weeks of backlog across the free healthcare service.

6. Dun and Bradstreet/NetProspex (33.6 Million Records Breached)

Dun and Bradstreet, the Business Analysists, saw a massive 52.6gb database breached back in March 2017. 33.6 Million records were breached with in-depth details about each person. The data belonged to NetProspex who Dun and Bradstreet purchased for $125 million in 2015.

There was data breached that had information on the US Army, Air Force and many more high-profile services across the USA.

5. Uber (57 Million Records Breached)

It was revealed in November this year that Uber the global transportation company concealed a 2016 data breach. Taking place in October 2016, the breach contained information on 600,000 drivers and nearly 60 million users of the app.

Uber confirmed they paid a $100,000 ransom for the hackers to delete the information that had been compromised.

4. Equifax (145 Million Records Breached)

Equifax, the credit reporting company, suffered one of the most high-profile data breaches this year when over 145 million records were stolen including credit card numbers. 143 Million people in the USA were affected, but it also hit the UK and Canada.

Equifax discovered the breach in late July 6 weeks after it took place and didn’t make the cyber attack public until September.

3. Deep Root Analytics/Republican National Committee (198 Million Records Breached)

It wasn’t a good year to be an American with data. The Republican National Committee hired Deep Root Analytics a marketing company who left a ton of data exposed. Over 60% of the American population had their address, birthdates, numbers and more exposed.

The data became publicly accessible on Amazon cloud server stored in a spreadsheet format.

2. Motor Vehicles Department in Kerala (200 Million Records Breached)

You may be surprised to see the southern Indian state so high up on this list. In May this year, the official database of the Motor Vehicles Department in Kerala was compromised. Over 10 million drivers had their addresses and numbers published online.

It was also claimed that over 200 million vehicle owners on the database had their data breached too.

1. River City Media (1.34 Billion Records Breached)

No, we didn’t miss type this. In June, this year it was disclosed that marketing business River City Media didn’t have sufficient protection on their database of 1.34 Billion email accounts. For reference, the world population is only 7.6 billion!

River City Media collected email/IP addresses and physical addresses of over 1 billion people via spam emails.

Conclusion

Want to know some more of the biggest cyber attacks in history? Why not take a look at our 2016 list or at five of the biggest cyber attacks of all time.

It’s not just global scale companies that suffer from cyber attacks. Your data could be being breached without you even knowing. Take a look at our guide on ‘Who might be carrying out a cyber attack on your business?’

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