The biggest cyberattacks by hackers in the world

In 2000, at the age of 15, Jonathan James, or as he was known in the hacking community, “C0mrade,” carried out attacks on the Defense and Threat Control Division of the U.S. Department of Defense, NASA, and the Marshall Space Flight Center in Huntsville, Alabama. Unfortunately, his “fun” was cut short when he was involved in an identity theft case. He spent six months in juvenile detention.

Idaho National Laboratory/Flickr

Epsilon was the world's largest email marketing company. In 2011, the company handled over 40 billion emails and over 2,000 brands worldwide. On April 4, the system was breached, exposing the private email addresses of millions of people. The specific type of attack launched against Epsilon is called spear phishing.

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In December 2006, there was a security breach at Marshalls, which exposed the credit card information of 94 million customers. The operation led to the arrest and 40-year prison sentence of a legendary hacker known as Albert Gonzalez, who worked with 11 others. He was sentenced to 20 years in prison, the longest sentence ever given to an American for computer crimes

TrojanDan/Flickr

Sony's Playstation Network holds the personal information of hundreds of millions of its customers. On April 17, 18, and 19, 2011, Sony's system was breached by hackers. The information of 77 million people was stolen. As a result, it disabled its network for three weeks.

JeepersMedia/Flickr

From Home Depot to Target, major retailers have been hit by attacks. About 110 million accounts were compromised. Names, addresses, phone numbers, email addresses, and credit card information were exposed. The attack, which began in 2014, cost $148 million.

ETC@USC/Flickr

While many cyberattacks target customers and their personal information, the attack on Sony Pictures Entertainment targeted employees. U.S. intelligence officials have alleged that North Korean hackers were behind the attacks and were able to infiltrate Sony Pictures' systems. North Korea has denied the allegations.

Sprengben [why not get a friend]/Flickr

Occupy Central Hong Kong began in September 2014. Two websites, Apple Daily and PopVote, were supporters of Occupy Central, but due to their pro-democracy stance, the websites became targets of cyberattacks.

djLicious/Flickr

Heartland Payment Systems is a company that handles credit card transactions for businesses large and small. So if just one dollar had been stolen from each card, the thieves could have made off with $134 million, which they did. The head of this operation was Albert Gonzalez, the same man responsible for the TJX breach in 2006.

Montreal Tech Watch/Flickr

Michael Calce, known as MafiaBoy, was only 15 years old when he bombarded countless websites with repeated requests to connect, illegally using computers at well-known universities, such as California, Berkeley and Massachusetts. The court sentenced him to eight months in a reformatory and a mandatory contribution of a (small) amount of money to a charity. During the hearing, he admitted to the five-hour paralysis of well-known websites in February 2000, such as CNN.com, Amazon.com, Yahoo.com and eBay.com. The court ruled that Mafiaboy deliberately launched his cyberattacks on websites from Canada, the United States, Denmark and Korea. His parents had asked the court for leniency, arguing that their son had no intention of causing damage, but simply testing his abilities.

Almudena Fndez/Flickr

He grew up in the 1980s, when the internet was still in its infancy. Morris is the son of a former NSA employee and became famous for creating the infamous Morris worm. The first worm to spread over the internet. He was also the first digital fraudster to be prosecuted in the US in 1986. More than 6,000 computers at universities, research centers, and military installations were infected with the worm. In 1990, Morris was sentenced to 3 years probation, 400 hours of community service, and a $10,500 fine.

Source: huffingtonpost.gr