4. Gawker Media, 2010
The PSN and SOE intrusions are the latest massive data breaches and leaks. We've looked at nine other cases of hacking, espionage and plain old corporate stupidity.
Gawker Media is one of the most popular blog networks on the Internet today. With properties including Gizmodo, Kotaku, and Deadspin, the company has a presence in nearly every facet of pop culture.
Late last year, the hacker group Anonymous turned an evil eye towards the company, who often poked fun at the group on their Gawker gossip blog. Anonymous response to the prodding? They hacked into Gawker's servers, stole information on up to 1.4 million users as well as internal memos, and slowed down/shut down several of Gawker's sites for several days with Distributed Denial of Service (DDoS) attacks.
The end result: Readers were urged to change their account passwords, and some users who (stupidly) used the same email and password combo for other sites and services were hacked, with the latter not being terribly widespread.
I like the article however you appear to be missing the potentially scarier breach that happenned to RSA on March 18th 2011. Customer data was not stolen but information regarding the SecureID system used by thousands of comanies may have been obtained.
I like the article however you appear to be missing the potentially scarier breach that happenned to RSA on March 18th 2011. Customer data was not stolen but information regarding the SecureID system used by thousands of comanies may have been obtained.
Thanks for reading! We wanted to cap this article at ten examples so we left out the RSA breach, as well as a few dozen other companies/entities.
-Devin Connors
excellent article. very informative! and very interesting!
Good article, it shows that no company or government agency is immune from data breach.
Texas pension system had a big breach this spring, exposing sensitive information, including SSNs, of ~3.5M Texas state employees: http://www.txsafeguard.org/ .
Some of that data was left unencrypted on the server for over 1 year!
The post-handling of the issue is also somewhat questionable (from the point of view of the end-user, err. victim).
There is an interesting discussion on that here: http://door64.com/blog/n/30938
Gawker Media was the best. That made me so, so happy back then. Gizmodo and Kotaku writers made me hate that company like I've never hated a company before.
Good article, it shows that no company or government agency is immune from data breach.
Thank God American electronic voting machines are immune to fraud.
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