September 20, 2023
By Sonakshi Kandhari
In a technology-driven world, hacktivism and cybercriminals have left both the government and organisations dumbfounded. Let’s traverse through history and learn about 10 such cyberattacks that are impossible to fathom.
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Conceptualised by David Lee in 1999, it involved sending users a file that had to be opened on Microsoft. Opening it resulted in widespread damage to several hundred companies, including Microsoft.
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James Jonathan, a 15-year-old, was the brainchild behind this. The hacking resulted in the shutdown of NASA computers for 21 days. The software causing the virus was downloaded on 17 million systems.
Image Source: NASA
It gripped the entire nation and resulted in 56 websites going offline in 2007. This was during the time that the country was having heated arguments with Russia over the relocation of the Bronze Soldier of Tallinn.
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It affected 2.9 million users. In addition to taking their credit card numbers and passwords, 35.1 million customers also lost their IDs and passwords.
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In 2014, this cyberattack affected 500 million accounts. A user’s basic information and passwords were compromised. Aleksey Balkan was hired by the Russians to execute this act.
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There was a data breach involving 57 million users and drivers combined in 2016. To keep the matter contained and delete the information, the company paid the hackers 100,000 dollars.
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The data of an appalling 77 million users was breached in April 2011. As a result of it, the gamers accounts were blocked for a span of one week to prevent further such leaks.
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It came to light in 2018. By then, the information of 339 million guests had been breached. The ICO (Information Commissioner's Office) filed with the Marriott Group hotels a fine of 18.4 million pounds.
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The hacker composed a 100-GB text file with 8.4 billion leaked passwords in it. Some of the data was old, but it's still the largest leak ever because of the weight of the data.
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The first ever cyberattack on a power grid occurred in 2015, leaving 2,00,000 people to grapple without electricity. A Russian hacker group called Sandworm was responsible for it.
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