10 of the Top Data Breaches of the Decade

[Jake Kouns <jkouns () opensecurityfoundation org>]

http://abcnews.go.com/Technology/10-top-data-breaches-decade/story?id=10905634

The Internet cried foul last week when news broke that an AT&T
security breach exposed the e-mail addresses of at least 100,000
owners of Apple's iPad 3G.

The blogosphere cried foul last week when news broke that an AT&T
security breach exposed the e-mail addresses of at least one hundred
thousand owners of Apple's iPad 3G, but cyber crime has been around
for a long time.

But industry observers are quick to point out that this is hardly the
first -- and hardly the worst -- data breach that the tech world has
ever seen.

"The fact is 114,000 is an impressive number and they're e-mail
addresses. ... [But] that's almost public information," said Dan
Tynan, a technology reporter and co-author of the technology humor
site eSarcasm.

Some companies publish relevant e-mail addresses on their sites, and
even when companies don't outright reveal addresses, it's often easy
to guess them, he said.

"What these guys did was something that spammers do every single day," he said.

While it's discomforting when any personal information is compromised,
Tynan said that this breach didn't expose seriously valuable
information, such as social security numbers, bank account numbers or
medical records.

But other security breaches over the past decade have disclosed the
kind of information that could potentially threaten the people behind
the data.

[..]
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