Locked What are the most well-known cyber attacks ?

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What are the most well-known cyber attacks ?

The massive so-called SolarWinds attack, detected in December 2020, breached U.S. federal agencies, infrastructure and private corporations in what is believed to be among the worst cyberespionage attacks inflicted on the U.S. On Dec. 13, 2020, it was revealed that Austin-based IT management software company SolarWinds was hit by a supply chain attack that compromised updates for its Orion software platform. As part of this attack, threat actors inserted their own malware, now known as Sunburst or Solorigate, into the updates, which were distributed to many SolarWinds customers. The first confirmed victim of this backdoor was cybersecurity firm FireEye, which had disclosed on Dec. 8 that it had been breached by suspected nation-state hackers. It was soon revealed that SolarWinds attacks affected other organizations, including tech giants Micrososft and VMware and many U.S. government agencies. Investigations showed that the hackers -- believed to be sponsored by the Russian government -- had been infiltrating targeted systems undetected since March 2020. As of January 2021, investigators were still trying to determine the scope of the attack.

• Here is a rundown of some of the most notorious breaches, dating back to 2009:

- a July 2020 attack on Twitter, in which hackers were able to access the Twitter accounts of high-profile users.

- another 2016 attack, this time at FriendFinder, which said more than 20 years' worth of data belonging to 412 million users was compromised.

- a data breach at Yahoo in 2016 that exposed personal information contained within 500 million user accounts, which was then followed by news of another attack that compromised 1 billion user accounts.

- a 2014 attack against entertainment company Sony, which compromised both personal data and corporate intellectual property (IP), including yet-to-be-released films, with U.S. officials blaming North Korea for the hack;

- eBay's May 2014 announcement that hackers used employee credentials to collect personal information on its 145 million users.