Top 10 Cyber Attacks In History | Biggest Cyber Attacks Of All Time

10. from april 27 2007 estonia the european country faced a series of cyber attacks that lasted for weeks this happened when the estonian government decided to move the bronze soldier from talon center to a less prominent military cemetery located on the city's outskirts unprecedented levels of internet traffic took down estonian banks online services media outlets broadcasters and government bodies botnets sent massive waves of spam and vast amounts of automated online requests according to researchers the public faced ddos attacks there were conflicts to edit the english language version of the bronze soldiers wikipedia page as well although there is no confirmation russia is believed to be behind these cyber attacks that largely crippled the estonian society let's now move on to the next attack on december 23 2015 several parts of ukraine witnessed a power outage and this was not a typical blackout it was indeed the result of a cyber attack information systems of three energy distribution companies in ukraine were compromised it is the first known victorious cyber attack on apar grid it is said that here hackers sent out phishing emails to the power companies 30 substations were switched off and about 230 000 people were left in the dark for about one to six hours us investigators believed that russia-based hackers were responsible for this experts have warned that other countries could also be vulnerable to such attacks let's see what we have at number eight in the year 1999 a cyber attack cost a 21 day shutdown of nasa computers unbelievable isn't it the hacker was none other than the then 15 year old jonathan james he first penetrated u.s department of defense division's computers and installed a back door on its servers this allowed him to intercept more than a thousand government emails including the ones containing usernames and passwords this helped james steal a piece of nasa software and crack the nasa computers that support the international space station which cost the space exploration agencies forty one thousand dollars as systems were shut down for three weeks he was the first person to carry out a computer hack against the american space agency let's now move on to the next attack in late november 2014 there was a leak of confidential data from the film studio of sony pictures information about sony pictures employees their emails copies of the then unreleased sony films future propositions and other crucial data were leaked this cyber attack was carried out by a hacker group named guardians of peace so what did the hackers want well they demanded that sony withdraw its then upcoming movie the interview this movie was a comedy story line to assassinate the north korean leader kim jong-un sony then decided to cancel the film's theatrical release due to the threats at cinema screening the movie it is indeed hard to trace the roots of a cyber attack in this case after evaluation the u.s intelligence officials arrived at the theory that the attack was in a way related to the government of north korea however north korea had denied the same moving on to our number six in december 2006 tjx the u.s retailer company identified that 45.6 million debit and credit card details were stolen this happened from one of its systems over 18 months by an unknown number of intruders it was one of the first largest ever cyber attacks involving the loss of personal data as a result banks in the affected regions had to reissue and block thousands of payment cards a group of hackers did this albert gonzalez being the mastermind the group was from miami the place where the tjx heist was believed to have originated reports said that the tjx data breach occurred because of weak web encryption at two of its marshall stores in miami next moving on to our top five let us see what we have at number five the year 2010 witnessed the discovery of the deadly computer worm stuxnet this malware's motive was unlike any other usual cyber attacks it aimed at destructing the equipment the computers controlled stuxnet came with the deadly purpose of damaging iran's nuclear infrastructure it infected more than 200 000 computers including 14 industrial sites and a uranium enrichment plant in iran stuxnet initially spread via microsoft windows and targeted siemens industrial control systems although it was discovered only in 2010 it is believed to have been silently sabotaging iran's nuclear facilities it was one of the first discovered malware that was capable of hampering hardware systems it largely damaged the centrifuge of the iranian reactors this is believed to be a cyber weapon created by the u.s and the israeli intelligence although there is no documented evidence or acceptance by either of the countries for the same moving on to number four in the year 2014 home depot was the victim of one of the deadliest cyber attacks 56 million payment cards were compromised along with 53 million customer email addresses stolen this security breach happened from april to september 2014. criminals were believed to have used a third-party vendor's username and password to enter the perimeter of home depot's network the attackers were then able to deploy custom built malware on its self-checkout systems in the us and canada moving on to our top three as you might be aware the playstation gaming system is one of sony's most popular products unfortunately in april 2011 sony executives witnessed abnormal activity on the playstation network this resulted in the compromise of approximately 77 million playstation users accounts and prevented users of playstation 3 and playstation portable consoles from accessing this service this forced sony to turn off the playstation network on april 20th on may 4th sony confirmed that personally identifiable information from each of the 77 million accounts had been exposed the outage lasted for 23 days sony released almost daily announcements concerning the system outage in the end sony is believed to have invested approximately 170 million dollars to improve the network security to investigate the attack and to cover the expenses of caring for the consumers that had been affected let's now move on to the next attack at number two in may 2017 one of the most dangerous cyber attacks took place it was known as the wannacry ransomware attack caused by the wannacry crypto worm the victims were the users that used the unsupported version of microsoft windows and those who hadn't installed the new security update this did not take place through phishing like other attacks but through an exposed vulnerable smb port the attack originated in asia and then eventually spread across the globe in a day more than 200 000 computers were infected across 150 countries the wannacry crypto worm locked the users out of the targeted systems and encrypted their data the users were asked for a ransom of 300 to 600 which had to be paid via bitcoin in exchange for their data this attack took a toll on both private and government organizations it resulted in damages from hundreds of millions to billions of dollars in a matter of few days the emergency patches released by microsoft halted the attack also the discovery of a kill switch prevented the infected computers from spreading the crypto worm security experts in a few countries believed that north korea was behind this attack and finally let's see what we have at number one more than two decades ago in march 1999 the melissa virus a mass mailing macro virus was released it targeted microsoft word and outlook based systems and created considerable network traffic melissa virus infected computers via emails the email would look like an important message well yes it was fake if the recipient opens the attachments in the mail and downloads the document and then opens it with microsoft word a virus was released on their computers this would then mass mail itself to the first 50 people in the victims contact list and then disable multiple safeguard features on microsoft word and microsoft outlook this began spreading like a wildfire across the internet david l smith released the virus the virus cost nearly 80 million worth of damages it did not steal data or money however it caused a havoc almost 1 million email accounts were disrupted worldwide agencies were overloaded and some had to be shut down entirely and internet traffic in some locations were slowed down so with that we come to the end of this video on the top 10 computer hacks of all time do you agree with our list if you're aware of any other great interesting computer hacks in history do let us know in the comment section below.