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Home Trivia Trivia: What Was the Biggest Data Breach of the Past Ten Years?

Trivia: What Was the Biggest Data Breach of the Past Ten Years?

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June 16, 2025

TRIVIA

What Was the Biggest Data Breach of the Past Ten Years?

The CAM4 data breach of 2020 exposed the full names, email addresses, chat and email contents, sexual orientation of 10.9 billion of their users. The breach happened because of a misconfigured Elasticsearch database which was inadvertently left world-accessible. CAM4 is a sexually-themed live streaming service. So in addition to the usual threats of identity theft, and being added to phishing attack databases and brute-force password databases, the unfortunate users of the CAM4 platform are also likely to be blackmail targets. They could be susceptible to defamation attempts for years to come. In 2003 Yahoo! suffered a breach that compromised the records of 1 billion user accounts. The breach was only revealed in 2016 when Yahoo! was in the midst of negotiations with Verizon who were considering buying Yahoo! that year. Shortly after the first announcement, it was discovered that the figure was actually 3 billion compromised user accounts. In addition to the usual personally identifiable information, the leaked data also included users' security questions and answers. Users were requested to change their passwords and to enter new security answers and questions. Yahoo! promised these would be encrypted this time. The Aadhaar system was launched in India in 2009. It provides a unique 12-digit ID number to Indian citizens and passport holders. In March 2018 it was revealed that the personal information of more than 1 billion registered users could be bought on the dark web. It contained their full real names, their 12-digit number, and their bank details. It also contained biometric data such as thumbprints, retina scans, and any other identifying physical feature. The cause of the breach was another misconfigured database running on a system maintained by a state-owned utility company. The smallest breach in our list still managed to compromise the personal data of 885 million users! The First American Financial Corporation had a massive breach in 2019. The data was made up of bank records, social security numbers, mortgage details, and wire transactions, and drivers license images going back over 16 years. Amazingly, the data was accessible to anyone with a web browser. No hacking required.

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Dave McKay has over 30 years of experience in the IT industry. He has been a freelance programmer, the manager of an international software development team, an IT services project manager, and a Data Protection Officer. He is now a technology journalist and independent Data Protection and Compliance consultant.

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