In a recent survey, more than half of small and medium-sized businesses lacked any kind of cyber insurance. (Photo: Shutterstock)
What do the odd-sounding names of Shadow Brokers, WannaCry and Petya have in common? They were behind recent massive security breaches. Shadow Brokers made off with NSA hacking tools; WannaCry and NotPetya are both strains of ransomware that infected computers all over the world.
These security breaches made headlines around the globe and plenty of others have compromised millions of consumers' information. Here are the four breaches that directly affected the most consumers, all of which have taken place in the past few years.
- In 2013 and 2014, 3 billion user accounts at Yahoo were compromised.
- In 2016, more than 412 million accounts in the FriendFinder Network were compromised.
- In 2014, a cyberattack on eBay exposed data from 145 million users.
- In 2017, the Equifax breach compromised sensitive information for an estimated 143 million U.S. consumers.
Although these breaches received a lot of media attention, most of the news stories pretty much ended with the breaches themselves. What happens – and what needs to happen – after the breach created relatively little discussion. That, in my opinion, is a problem.
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