UPDATED 09:50 EDT / JUNE 13 2011

NEWS

Big Data Breaches: A 6 Month Downfall

These past few months seems to have spurred an unusually large number of hacks targeted against some of the biggest names in the tech industry. The first one to be highlighted on this list is Sony, which has been breached more than a dozen times by various entities including LulzSec, a hacker group.

The personal data of hundreds of millions of users was leaked, and that’s just the first incident that affected the Sony Play station Network.

”A hacker stole the names, birth dates and possibly credit-card numbers from the accounts of more than 100 million users who play online videogames through Sony’s PlayStation console,” reports The Wall Street Journal.

One of the more major hacks targeting Sony came shortly after the the first and biggest one was carried out: the passwords of over 1,000,000 customers were compromised, all contributing to the shut down the popular gaming network for an extended period of time. The same group also hacked Nintendo, exposing the vulnerability it exploited to facilitate the attack – a simple SQL injection.

Also among the most prominent Cybersecurity breaches that occurred lately is the RSA hack.  EMC’s security division was recently breached, and critical data about its SecurID technology was obtained by hackers. Millions of employees use SecurID tokens to access their corporate networks, and one of the companies that leverage this system is defense contractor Lockheed Martin.

On a regular Sunday, network administrators detected an intrusion. The company was quick to shut down all access to its systems until the problem was resolved, and while there are not too many details available no vital data has been compromised.

These major security headlines have raised a great deal of concern about the way enterprises protect their data, but this concern has been around for quite some time. For example, the 2009 hacking of transaction processor Heartland Payment Systems compromised data concerning billions of transactions, adding up to one of the largest cybersecurity breeches in history.

Here’s an infographic on Sony’s recent hack, a timeline of one of history’s biggest ever data breaches.


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