With every app, website and social networking site asking us to “Allow” them the access to your phone, contacts, online clouds and whatever you may think of. The allowing game is more than what we bother to pay attention to. I saw a quote floating on my news-feed saying “if you are not paying for the services you have, you are the product”. It took me hours to digest and brainstorm all the research I had to do after reading this. All the social networking sites we use, the apps, everywhere where we give consent to access our information is making our profiles in their respective directories.

Seeing the ad in your news-feed of something you only clicked to check out the product or by mistake is not anymore a mystery. AI is taking notes of your online behaviour, disliking, inclinations, choices and a very close idea of how you actually think. This fact may sound basic to most of us, but, the news about data breaches may not.

Here is the list of biggest Cyber Security Breaches we saw in the year 2018:

Facebook

Facebook admitted that around 50 million users were compromised by the security breach. As per Facebook CEO, the company has not seen the accounts getting compromised nor found any inappropriate activity. Later, Zuckerberg confirmed that the attackers used Facebook developer APIs for getting information. The information was comprised of names, genders, localities which were linked with any user’s profile page.

Facebook users even had concerns about their private messages getting accessed and their credit or debit information could have been breached, too. These claims are still not confirmed through any credible source.

The loophole got identified in the “View As” button which lets the users visit their profile as someone from their friends or Public audience. This tool allowed the hackers to get Facebook access for taking over more than 50 million profiles. Facebook responded to it by making “View As” button unavailable for users. This breach affected Facebook founder Mark Zuckerberg, Sheryl Sandberg, its chief operating officer, and its European vice-president, Nicola Mendelsohn and thousands of Facebook users in the UK. The culprits are still unidentified.

The most common sign for data access verified the rumour when users Facebook accounts logged out. Around 90 million users faced the logging out on their laptops, phones, tablets which also counts Facebook Messenger. Facebook is still unsure when exactly this happened but the spots are found on the site somewhere in July 2017 and it was identified on 16th of September 2018.