To say that 2015 is the year of the hackers is a bit of an understatement. There are a number of high-profile breaches that happened this year that included toys, hotels, vehicles and, of course, online accounts.

Let’s look back at this year’s vulnerabilities and hope security measures have been taken to make 2016 more secure.

Hotels

It was recently revealed that the payment-processing infrastructure of Hyatt Hotels Corp. was hacked. A virus was discovered to have infected gift shop and restaurant points-of-sale systems.

Earlier this year, Starwood Hotels and Resorts Worldwide, Inc. also reported a data breach, and security analysts believe that the hacks were carried out by Chinese hackers who are out to get sensitive information from government staff and officials. The virus exposed names on cards, card numbers, security codes and expiration dates.

Kids’ stuff

One might think that kids’ online toys and sites will be safe from hackers, but think again. This year, we saw toymaker VTech Holdings Ltd. hacked, compromising names, email addresses, passwords and home addresses of 4,833,678 parents who bought products, as well as the details of some 200,000 children. Another hack related to children occurred when sanriotown.com was

Another hack related to children occurred when sanriotown.com was hit, exposing 3.3 million users’ first and last names, birthdays, genders, countries of origin, email addresses, unsalted SHA-1 password hashes, password hint questions and corresponding answers, and other data points that appear to be website related.

Social media

One of the most controversial security breaches this year happened when Ashley Madison, a site that promotes promiscuity, was hacked and exposed the data of its millions of users, which resulted in some ruined relationships, as well as extortion. Because of the breach, multiple lawsuits were filed against Avid Life Media, Inc. (ALM), the parent company of Ashley Madison, when it was revealed that ALM didn’t have ample security in place to thwart such an attack and that users were not immediately notified of the breach. Another hook up site hacked this year was FriendFinder and

Another hook-up site hacked this year was FriendFinder. The hack compromised 63 million users. The hackers revealed millions of stolen data that included sexual preferences of users, sexual orientation, if they were looking to cheat on their partners, along with email addresses, usernames, dates of birth, postal codes and IP addresses of users.

The government

The Internal Revenue Services (IRS) was hacked back in May, but it wasn’t until August that the government agency admitted the full extent of the attack. According to reports, records of about 330,000 American tax payers were compromised, and there were further attempts to access 280,000 more records, but that was prevented.

The IRS originally reported the hackers targeted 225,000 U.S. households, which included about 114,000 successful attempts and 111,000 unsuccessful ones. The updated number was a result of the IRS’ further investigation, which went as far back as November 2014.

Gamers aren’t spared

Digital game distribution platform Steam was once again hacked earlier this year, but this time, hackers did not require any elaborate scheme to compromise users as they only exploited a bug in the lost password function. Instead of requiring a code that is sent to a user’s email, leaving the “enter the code” field blank would still trigger a password reset. The bug has been fixed since it was made public. Xbox Live also

Xbox Live also experienced downtime earlier this year, with TeamBudyBear claiming responsibility for the hack to show “how bad big company’s care about security.”

An elaborate data heist

Chinese hackers have been pretty busy this year. Back in June, it was revealed that they have breached the Office of Personnel Management (OPM) and obtained the records of over 4 million present and present employees. Other hacks believed to have been launched by Chinese hackers also included the attack on Anthem, Inc., which resulted in stolen medical records and other sensitive personal data belonging to some 80 millions Americans, as well as the two-fold attack against American Airlines Group, Inc. and flight reservation management giant Sabre Corp.  These hacks are believed to be state-sponsored with the end goal of gaining more information about government personnel.

Photo by theglobalpanorama