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History of cyber attacks
What is the best way to illustrate the growing threat of cyber attacks? You could count the number of attacks happening worldwide. There are several maps available on the internet showing cyber-attacks happening in real time from companies such as Threatcloud, FireEye and Kaspersky. These make troubling viewing. On a typical day they might log around 16 million attacks (3) happening around the globe. However, these attacks are not all successful, nor is there any sense of the scale or severity of each one.
A different way to monitor the cyber threat is to measure it by counting the number of records breached. This method gives a better sense of scale and only includes successful attacks by definition. The chart to the right shows the cumulative number of records breached in cyber-attacks over the last 15 years based on data from the Identity Theft Resource Center (idtheftcenter.org).
When cyber criminals hacked the WIFI network of a Minnesota store and stole the details of 94 million credit cards from TJ Maxx in 2007, people were shocked by the scale of the breach. But as the chart shows, that breach has paled into insignificance when compared to the scale of the recent events such as the 1.3bn email records (4) breached when the spam operator River City Media was hacked in 2017.
Not just the USA
Also note that while early breaches tended to be US focussed, they have now spread geographically to become a truly global problem. For example, in 2018:
- Nametests, an online quiz app based in Germany suffered a 120m record breach.
- Some 200m Chinese resumes filled with phone numbers and work place details surfaced on the dark web from an unknown source.
- The personal information of more than a billion Indian citizens were leaked from the government’s new national identity database known as Aadhaar. This is the world largest biometric database which can be reportedly bought online on the dark web for as little as $10.
