Cyberattacks 2016: With Yahoo Breach And US Election Hack, 5 Times Internet Security Was Compromised

Cyberattacks have seen an upsurge in 2016. Governments, private companies and even internet service providers (ISPs) have suffered from several cyberattacks in 2016. They have impacted social media websites and are believed to have affected the outcome of the 2016 presidential election.

Here are five major cyberattacks that took place in 2016:

Democratic National Committee email hack: DNC’s emails were leaked on July 22, 2016, and subsequently published by WikiLeaks. The leaked emails included 19,252 emails and 8,034 attachments from DNC, prompting resignations of DNC chair Debbie Wasserman Schultz and Communications Director Luis Miranda. WikiLeaks also published hacked emails from Democrat Hillary Clinton’s campaign Chairman John Podesta’s account.

On Dec. 9, CIA briefed the U.S. intelligence community that Russia conducted the operations to support Donald Trump, who ultimately won the election.

Yahoo breach: Yahoo said Wednesday that it had discovered a data breach affecting 1 billion users. The company blamed a “state-sponsored actor" for the breach, but did not specify who it was referring to. User data was stolen using forged cookies, which gave intruders access to 500 million accounts without a password.

Dyn cyberattack: A major cyberattack took place on Oct. 21 affecting Twitter, Spotify, Pinterest and Reddit along with a host of other sites. The attack was focused on Dyn, an internet service provider that provides backend support to these sites. The attack also caused outages affecting CNN, GitHub, the Guardian and SoundCloud. It is still not clear who was behind the attack.

Operation Icarus cyberattack: The Anonymous hacking collective shut down banks around the world including the U.S. Federal Reserve Bank of Boston, the Bank of England and the Bank of France on May 16 in an attack codenamed Operation Icarus. The operation began with an attack on the Central Bank of Greece, also targeting the Bank of the Dominican Republic, the Dutch Central Bank, the Central Bank of Maldives, and Guernsey Financial Services Commission.

LinkedIn cyberattack: LinkedIn confirmed a breach causing more than 100 million of its users’ passwords to be leaked in June. The company sent out an email to all its members about the data breach that involved the cyber theft of email addresses, hashed passwords and LinkedIn member IDs.