Largest hacker attacks in history

Theft of customer data

At the end of last year, the U.S. retail chain Target was the target of one of the biggest hacker attacks in history. About 100 million customers had their data captured, with personal and credit card information compromised.

Hackers take out land bases and prevent 10 flights from taking off in Poland

At least ten LOT flights were cancelled yesterday (21/06/2015) due to a hacker attack on the ground base computers of Warsaw Airport in Poland; about 1,400 people could not continue their journey. The system used to monitor flight plans went out of the air and went back into operation just five hours after the attack. Another 12 domestic and international flights were delayed.

"We are using some of the world's most advanced computers, so this could be a threat to the entire aviation industry," said Adrian Kubick, LOT spokesman, according to The Guardian. The Polish company provided accommodation in passenger hotels that needed to spend the night at the airport. No planes were compromised.

The software responsible for managing flight plans considers a number of variables for route planning, such as weather conditions and the trajectory of other planes for collision risk assessment; fuel consumption efficiency is also assessed. This is not the first time that such an attack has happened: earlier this month, the ground base of a US airport also had its flight plans hacked.

Games without fun

In 2011, the PlayStation Network was attacked and information from nearly 80 million accounts was stolen. The network was down for nearly a month and generated an estimated loss of $2 billion.

Explosive code

In 1982, an attack perpetuated by CIA showed the physical damage that a simple corrupt command code can do. Hackers from the U.S. government agency managed to drive the control system of a Soviet gas pipeline crazy and start operating strangely.

The result, according to one member of the air force who participated in the operation, was one of the most impressive explosions ever seen from space - all without any weapons being fired. With the ever-increasing number of exclusively computer-controlled systems, with each passing day, attacks of this kind have ever-increasing destructive potential.

Largest hacker attack in history may have stolen the password of 1.2 billion accounts

According to the information security firm Hold Security, the biggest hacker attack in history is happening right now. This is the action of Russian hackers who have obtained passwords to almost 1.2 billion logins on several websites worldwide.

Hold Security only came out now because it was monitoring the hacker group's action for 7 months. According to the company, this is a team of men about 20 years who are located in a southern Russia city. The target of the group was not revealed by Hold Security, but the founder of the company said that both sites of companies that appear as some of the largest in the world and smaller portals were affected.

The attack would have obtained almost 600 million email addresses. Still according to the company that discovered the attack, it is done through a technique called "SQL Injection", which consists of forcing commands on a website to get the information from its database revealed.

It is worth remembering that Hold Security is the same company responsible for detecting a serious flaw in Adobe's charging system, which resulted in the data leakage of 38 million clients of the company. 

Translated from: https://www.perallis.com/news/maiores-ataques-hackers-da-historia