The Most Damaging Hackers' Attacks in History

In December 2013, Target and customers of Target were in shock when news came out 40 million Target credit cards had been stolen from nearly 2000 Target stores. The hackers accessed data on a point of sale system and over 11GB of data was stolen. Target had internal alerts and did not act, consequently Target found out about the breach when they were contacted by the Department of Justice. Target Corp. will pay 18.5 million to 47 states as part of a settlement over the 2013 data breach. The cost of the breach is ridiculously high. Senior management including CEO Gonsalves and CIO Baldwin lost their jobs. Members of Target’s board of directors were threatened with removal. Banks had to refund money stolen from customers via their credit cards and pay for replacement cards costing more than 200 million.

By using a cloud computing setup, hackers launched malware onto Home Depot’s servers in 2014. 56 million in debit and credit card numbers was taking before the hackers got kicked out of the servers. This approximately cost Home Depot roughly $56 Million dollars in restitution. A collective group of hackers calling themselves the Guardians of Peace managed to slip malware into Sony’s servers. The guardians claim to have stolen 100 terabytes of data from Sony’s servers. Cleanup and data recovery have cost Sony $100 million.

Health insurer Anthem’s cloud storage was hit hard by hackers in February 2015. A cyber-attack stole personal information for nearly 80 million people. The information that was stole included names and social security numbers, putting customers at risk for identity theft. It’s estimated this slip-up will cost Anthem more than $100 million.

Back in 2008, Heartland Payment Systems was hit by a nasty piece of malware that broke into their data room and stole over 130 million debit and credit card numbers. The company didn’t even know about it until early 2009! At the time it was the most expensive breach, totally around $140 million in legal fees and overall costs.

Beginning their attack in 2007, hackers hit the fashionable retailer TJ Maxx over an unbelievable 18-month period. The TJ Maxx hack originally caused $118 million in damages but has since ballooned to $162 million as they continue to deal with the after effects.

Sony PlayStation got hit in 2011, a few years before the Guardians set their sights on the entertainment division. Different hackers broke into Sony’s digital data room and made off with 100 million customer records from the PlayStation Online service. This cost them a massive $171 million and the public’s opinion of them soured after it was discovered Sony knew of the hack a full 6 days before they announced it to the public.

Crafty hackers hit the Hannaford Bros main servers in 2007, and the malware spread to all 300 of their stores as well as independent stores who sold Hannaford products. All in all, the hackers made off with 4.2 million debit and credit card numbers costing an estimated $252 million.

In 2006 the Veterans Administration got burned when the database containing all 26.5 million records was stolen.