The data breaches are no more an unusual incident and they have been commonly happening over the decades since a long time. The digital data breach originated much before the popular use of the internet, but still, they have been happening as well as are performed the same way as before. The data breach as part of overall cyber security breach has been performed for the last two-three decades, but as one of the landmark incident, it occurred in the year 1984 with the TRW Information System which known as the Experian today.
The TRW Information System was a credit reporting agency then. When the TRW Information System realised that one of the files in the database had been breached, it eventually understood how the breach was performed. During those periods the trove was protected by a password that was numeric in nature, and somebody took it and posted on a board of electronic bulletin. This was the source which served as a vulnerability for the TRW Information System data breach.
The TRW Information System data breach attackers gained access to sensitive information such as credit history and other personal details of 90 million US residents. The hacked password remained exposed for one month and then the TRW Information System declared that they changed the database password as soon as they knew about the data breach. One after another massive and large-scale data breach incidents occurred after the TRW Information System data breach incident regularly.
Then came the era of smartphone and IoT during early 2010 which ultimately expanded the interconnectivity. This was the time when data breach flourished resulting in alarming cybersecurity issues and concerns. Through data breach, the attackers could gain enormous personal sensitive information such as username and password, credit card information, etc. which was sufficient for the attackers to control the entire online life of the target victims.
This was clearly visible in the LinkedIn data breach incident in the year 2012 which eventually exposed the password of 6.5 million people. The hackers cracked the hashes in order to expose the users of LinkedIn and though LinkedIn tried precautions for resetting the affected passwords, the attacker could find other passwords from the web where the users used the same passwords. Eventually, this incident resulted in a hazard which ultimately taught that a single data breach incident can haunt the victims for years.
