Journalism of Courage
News reports have claimed that IRCTC, which has over 1 crore users and is India's big e-commerce portal, was possible hacked and user data stolen. While IRCTC has denied the hacking, it has called for a high-level committee probe to examine the possibility of a data theft. As far as data hacks go, if the IRCTC website has been compromised, it will be one of the biggest ones in India, given the sheer number of users on the site. We take a look at other significant data hacks in the world. Read more here
The US police, in 2002 arrested a British hacker Gary McKinnon, who allegedly hacked into NASA and 97 military computers in 2001 and 2002. McKinnon pulled, what can be called as the biggest ,military computer hack of all time, as he deleted files worth $700,000 and shut down 2,000 computers for 24 hours in Washington D.C. The hacker went by the name "Solo" to hack into computers.
A 18-year old man from UK was arrested for allegedly hacking into Sony and Microsoft systems on Christmas Day, causing disruptions which did not let users login. He was arrested in Southport for a denial-of-service attacks on Sony Playstations and Xbox, reports BBC. Read more here
Ashley Madison, a website to help “cheating spouses find a fling online”, was hacked by a group called The Impact Team in August 2015. The group threatened to post user information online if the website was not shut down. AshleyMadison.com is owned by Avid Life Media (ALM), a Toronto-based firm and claimed to have over 37 million users. The Impact Team leaked more than 25 gigabytes data on August 18 and August 20 in 2015. Read more here
Snapchat was recently hacked, after one of its employees accidentally opened a phishing e-mail. Some of the most sensitive data of its employees was stolen after the hack. Snapchat said that it knew for months about a security loophole that allowed hackers to harvest millions of phone numbers, and announced changes to its systems. An anonymous group called Snapchat DB posted the usernames and phone numbers of 4.6 million Snapchat users on New Year's Eve. Read more here
Evernote, the online note-taking service was hacked in 2013. The company asked 50 million users to change their passwords after the incident came to light. Evernote said the attacker was able to access an unspecified number of customers' encrypted passwords. Decoding such passwords can be difficult, but not impossible. Read more here
A software engineer from Russia hacked into Citibank's computer systems, New York in 1994, stealing more than $10 million. Vladimir Levin, along with six suspects were arrested in Britain. Citibank said that while the company detected the fraudulent transactions, it wasn't able to do so in time to notify the banks.
