With more and more information finding its way into digital formats, be it online or on hard drives, the number of data breaches has been going up. Over the years, there have been some big ones. By the end of Q3 2019 alone, there had been over 7.9 billion records exposed during data breaches. That represents a 33.3% increase over the same time period for 2018.
Looking at this trend, there are concerns that 2020 may be the worst year yet, but time will tell one way or another. What we will look at here is 5 of 2019’s big data breaches, though many more did happen, unfortunately.
Big 2019 Data Breaches
Third-Party Facebook App Exposure
It was revealed by UpGuard security researchers that several third-party apps on Facebook had suffered data breaches, exposing around 540 million records. This event occurred in 2019, and the data espoused included items like comments, Facebook IDs, photos, music, and likes. One of the targeted databases was from Cultura Colectiva, a media company based out of Mexico, the other being an app called “At the Pool.”
TrueDialog Data Breach
This is a real big one: over 1 billion records affected from the American communications company TrueDialog. Their database was kept on the Oracle Marketing Cloud, and they worked with over 990 cell phone operators which reached more than 5 billion people around the world. The data was collected from millions of SMS messages and contained information such as contents of messages, emails, phone numbers, and full names of recipients.
Orvibo Leaked Database
In July 2019, it was discovered that over 2 billion records had been exposed for those using Orvibo Smart Home products. According to sources, Orvibo claims to have over 1 million users of its service. These users range from homeowners, hotels, and businesses, with users being from all around the world.
It’s believed that the database was exposed for over two whole weeks, and included data like emails, passwords, family names, IP addresses, and precise geolocation.
Verifications.io Data Breach
A publicly accessible MondoDB database was discovered in April that contained over 808 million records. Verification.io, the owner of the database, was able to quickly shut down their databases once they were made aware of the breach. While there were four different collections of data that were accessed, the majority came from one called “mailEmailDatabase”. Specifically, there were three folders contained inside of this collection. They were called Emailrecords, emailWithPhone, and businessLeads.
Social Media Profiles Data Leak
This is the big one. 4 billion records leaked from an easily accessed server with information from various social media platforms. The server was discovered to be completely unprotected and accessible from a regular web browser. Absolutely no passwords or further authentication was required.
The data had information like names, emails, phones, and LinkedIn and Facebook profile information. This was a massive breach of trust for the users of these platforms who were rightly outraged by the breach.
So there we have it, some of the biggest data breaches of 2019 summed up. Take care with what information you’re willing to give away, and have a hard think about if it’s really worth it.
