Top 10 Worst Data Breaches in Internet History

Recently, the severity & rate of cyberattacks have been increasing in the past few years, especially in the years 2016 & moreover so, facing the worst era of various cyber-attacks & data breaches that is now; in this day, breaches are revealing more broader personal information impacting millions if not billions of people such as email addresses & passwords IP addresses, phone numbers; it doesn't just stop here, recent breaches have gone so far exposing credit card information, social medias, home addresses, and numerous other personal informations. Any website or company is vulnerable to cyber attacks regardless of security, even the most secure websites are prone to hacking masterminds; the sad fact is that most of websites do not or barely check its security status until a cybersecurity team notifies a data breach; therefore, here are the following most devastating cyber-attacks happened in internet history.
The Top Ten
1 Yahoo Breach Attacks

Yahoo has sustained critical data breaches on the past specifically back in around 2013 and so on, with one of the breaches exposing over 500 million user's personal information, and the other breaches has exposed personal information in such larger scales of up to over a billion of affected individuals, including names, email addresses, passwords, phone numbers, and other various personal information even including security questions of some users were exposed on the following attacks; in fact, over 3 billion yahoo accounts were affected in total. The attacks were very large that the price cost required a hundred million dollars or over in payment for the Yahoo company in order to compensate the total damage caused.

2 Marriott Breaches

The Marriott Company undergoes a severe data breach attack exposing a plethora of personal information of an estimated half a billion people, including phone numbers, credit cards, real names, other common information; some victims have been more unluckily exposed to such private information including passports & travel information. Most travelling & hotel companies are often known to be inconsistent in terms of data security and privacy protection, making them an easy target for hackers.

3 Equifax Breach

This company was known as a victim of one of the most severe data breaches in history, affecting estimated 145+ million people mostly of americans, but few people of other nations were affected as well. Information of the breach consists of wide, various & important personal information not only consisting of full names; birthdays, driver licenses, social security numbers, gender, email addresses, phone numbers, credit cards were included as well in most cases; social security numbers and names were the majority that was exposed in the breach. This resulted in multiple lawsuits against the company; so far so recently, the cost of compensating the damage caused & recovery (legal fees are excluded) totaled up to over a costly 1.4 billion dollars in payment.

4 Friend Finder Breach

The breach exposed precisely 412 million accounts taking place on one of the popular adult websites, one of the largest breaches based in quantities of affected numbers of accounts ranging from data that's over a decade old. The breach included usernames, email addresses, passwords, and possibly data from deleted accounts collected from other websites associated with Friend Finder.

5 Exactis

A company named Exactis undergoes a huge data breach, leaking various personal informations of 340 million people consisting of mostly email addresses, phone numbers, ages, and genders of affected individuals and possibly personal info of children of that affected person; the data exposed was significantly deeper compared to some other breaches, possibly revealing postal & financial information, individual interests and pet information, leading to a class action lawsuit in response due to the company unable to provide consistent protection to consumer data. Those who were affected potentially would experience identity theft and/or unauthorized use of money.

6 MySpace Breach

MySpace, a formerly popular social media fell victim to a breach that happened sometime years ago; approximately over 360 million accounts were affected, revealing over 427 million passwords therefore published available in the market; consisting of information including email addresses, and usernames were only exposed in the breach. Some accounts had included a second password or multiple passwords.

7 eBay Breach

EBay was also affected and suffered a massive breach that exposed 145 million accounts via unauthorized access in the system by hacking. The breach included common personal information of users; fortunately, no deeper nor important information such as financial data were exposed during the breach, but the overall information was sufficient in order for committing bad deeds. eBay noticed this and therefore strongly urged affected users to immediately change passwords.

8 Quora Data Breach

A suspicious third-party somehow was injected on the website Quora by hackers, collecting a large scale of personal information of estimated 100+ million people individually, such as real life names, email addresses, passwords, user activity (questions, answers, messages, upvotes & down votes of comments), linked social medias and other personal data; luckily, anonymous questions are not affected during the breach. Quora took action of the breach after being notified and immediately sent emails encouraging affected users to immediately change their passwords, and had forced log out all accounts affected by the breach.

9 Heartland Breach

The Heartland Payment Systems company was affected by a large data breach that took place in 2008, exposing over 100 million estimated credit cards and other digital information of each individual. A hacker named Albert Gonzalez was responsible for causing the breach; therefore, he was arrested & sentenced to 20 years in prison as a result of the cyber attack. The company took action of this via paying up a fine costing over 140+ million dollars as a settlement from the result of the breach.

10 Facebook Breach
The Contenders
11 Target Breach

Target, one of the most popular retail store company suffers a cyber attack revealing 41 million credit card infos combined with estimated up to 100+ million other personal information of individuals consisting of not only common information (i.e email address) but names, and pin data, debit cards. Fortunately, the company took action of the breach and payed millions of dollars (more than 10+ million dollars settlement) to compensate.

BAdd New Item