The Year Of Hacking: Remembering The 10 Biggest Cyber Attacks Of 2014
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Neiman Marcus
Soon after Target announced its breach, Neiman Marcus revealed that it too had been similarly attacked. The Texas-based retailer was alerted to fraudulent activity on customers’ credit cards, confirming that its system had been compromised and that credit card and debit card details were stolen. The three-month-long breach actually occurred in July 2013 and affected over 1 million customers, though it didn’t come to light until this year
Home Depot
Since I moved in January 2014, I was a frequent customer at Home Depot throughout year, and thus particularly unhappy to learn that over 50 million email addresses and credit card accounts were breached during an April cyber attack. The company says passwords and “sensitive personal information” weren’t compromised in the attack, but I’m not sure I buy that. My credit card company doesn’t either—they sent all Capital One cardholders replacement cards soon after details about the breach were released. Investigators believe that a third-party vendor stole account information that was then used to get into the company’s internal system. From there, a soft spot in Windows eased access (and was later patched by Microsoft), and then malware swiped information from registers—particularly targeting the self-checkout ones—for the next five months. This malware was also, apparently, a new design that officials hadn’t seen before. Yeah, this whole “we’ve never seen this kind of malware before” is happening more and more. Comforting, no? Some investigators believe that the Michael’s, Target, Neiman Marcus, and Home Depot incidents were carried out by a group of Eastern European hackers.
Ebay
Ebay’s 233 million users were affected by the breach of a database including email addresses and passwords. While the online auction site encouraged everyone to change their passwords, they said that no financial information was compromised. The Syrian Electronic Army claimed responsibility for this one.
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