The year 2016 witnessed numerous cyber attacks on US Companies. Some were carried out last year only to be discovered this year, whilst some were freshly anticipated by some state-sponsored actors.
Here’s the list of top cyber attacks made on US companies in the year 2016-
January 2016- The famous restaurant ‘Wendy’s’ reported in January 2016 that several of its customer details could have been compromised due to a hack carried out on its payment systems. The renowned eatery after carrying out a detailed investigation came to a conclusion that at least 1,025 Wendy’s locations had been affected, beginning as early as 2015. It apologized to all its patrons and asked them to reset the security aspects of their payment channels.
February 2016- The month witnessed a twitter handle leaking out vital information of more than 29,000 professionals working for Department of Homeland Security and FBI employees. The hacker with twitter handle name DotGovs said that he will furnish sensitive info of top leading politicians in the US in coming months. But didn’t kept his promise to date.
March 2016- This month of the current year witnessed major cyber espionage where over One and Half million Verizon Enterprise Customer’s contact info was leaked by a security vulnerability. The database of the company was hacked by a hacker from Asia who demanded a ransom of $100,000.
May 2016 witnessed one of the major breaches in LinkedIn history. Over 6.5 million passwords of users were exposed in the leak. Later LinkedIn made it official that the hack exposed details of more than 167 million users, out of whom 117 million had their email IDs and passwords exposed. The company later came up with a data breach report which stated that the leak was caused due to a hack of its database in 2012 in which critical info was exposed to hackers.
June 2016 witnessed the spill of information of more than 154 million US voters. The leak was carried out from an IP address from Serbia and that too when the US 2016 elections were just 4 months away.
In July 2016, CitiBank went through one of its worst nightmares of cyber attack. An employee induced a malicious code into the Citibank’s network across North America due to vengeance. And this act led to the shutdown of the banking network shutdown for more than 32 hours. The employee was sentenced to 21 months in federal prison and was fined $77,000.
In August 2016, Dropbox witnessed a cyber espionage in which account credentials of more than 68 million of its users were leaked. Hackers gained access to the account by using a Dropbox employee’s password and credentials exposed in 2012 LinkedIn breach.
The month of September 2016 witnessed Yahoo, Inc database leak in which more than 500 millions of its user names, email addresses, DOBs, phone numbers, and passwords were compromised. Yahoo took this hack very seriously as hackers groups threatened to expose details of more than 280 million users on the dark web. The probe is still underway.
October 2016 witnessed a cyber attack on a domain name service provider named DYN. This attack led to an outage for Twitter, Netflix, and The New York Times users. In late Oct’16 the FBI hinted that Russia was involved in this attack.
November 2016 witnessed a slew of cyber attacks on companies operating and serving in European nations which include Britain. It is believed that Russia was behind all these attacks.
December 2016 has witnessed a blame game when it comes to cyber attacks. Russia has blamed Germany for carrying cyber attacks on its financial system from early last month. And Germany openly accused Russia of carrying out cyber attacks on its businesses and government organizations in order to influence its 2017 elections.
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