Data leakages are unsanctioned divulgence or the unauthorized transfer of private data to the public or a third party. They often expose sensitive data, including intellectual property, customer information, and other critical information. Data leakages can result in huge financial losses.
Data leakages over the years
- Yahoo (2013-2014): The search engine giant suffered two major data breaches that would resulted in large-scale private data theft amounting to over 3 billion Yahoo user accounts, including phone numbers, email addresses, birth dates, and even security questions and answers.
- Equifax (2017): This data leak exposed the data of over 140 million American citizens. The source of the leak was a flaw in a web application which hackers exploited to execute their attack.
- Marriott International (2018): Hackers leaked the data of over 500 million customers of the prestigious hotel, including phone numbers, passport numbers, guest names, and more.
- Facebook (2018): This leak affected the political consulting firm Cambridge Analytica, resulting in the loss of over 80 million Facebook user data, which would later get used to influence the 2016 US presidential elections.
- Capital One (2019): Due to a misconfigured firewall, the data of over 100 million got leaked, exposing their vital details for hackers to exploit.
