10 of the World’s Biggest Recent Hacks and Data Breaches That Deserve Your Attention

Colorado Soldiers Return Home

US Military

A serious data breach from 2009 left roughly 76 million U.S. military veterans’ personal records and Social Security numbers in jeopardy. It was all the result of a serious mistake by the agency. The agency sent a defective hard drive back to its vendor for repairs but forgot to destroy the data first. Everything from health records to discharge papers was at risk, resulting in the “single largest release of personally identifiable information by the government ever.”

JP Morgan Chase & Co sign outside headquarters in New York

JPMorgan Chase

Earlier this year, roughly 76 million Americans received devastating news when hackers made their way past the security walls of the nation’s largest bank. The hackers had access to millions of people’s private information, including their names, addresses, phone numbers, emails and more. It was even more frightening for the public to realize that the hackers gained access to the bank’s supposedly secure files in June and managed to sift through information until they were discovered in July. By then, the hackers already had obtained the highest level of administrative privilege to dozens of the bank’s computer servers.

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