This Is the Most Damaging Cyber Attack in History

We live in a world where data is paramount for the function of businesses, the economy, and even our day-to-day lives. This sort of commodification of data has presented enticing targets across the board for hackers, bad actors, and advanced persistent threats. So, let’s take a look at some of the most damaging cyber attacks in the history of computing. 

Stuxnet

Typically, you can break cyber attack perpetrators into a few categories. State-sponsored hackers are the ones you want to keep an eye on, given their wide-ranging resources and sophisticated techniques. Stuxnet is an alleged collaboration between American and Israeli actors and was used in a 2010 attack against Iranian uranium enrichment facilities to hinder the development of nuclear armaments. A monetary value can’t be given for the damage inflicted, but nearly 1,000 centrifuges were damaged or destroyed as a result.

Wannacry

Ransomware is one of the newer means of cyber attack waged against people and organizations alike. It’s a fairly simple concept: your computer gets locked down unless you pay a ransom. Now, in most cases, I’d say just avoid paying the ransom and default to a good, known backup. However, 2017’s WannaCry is remarkable because of the sheer scope of its range. With nearly 230,000 computers across over 150 countries affected, this resulted in possibly hundreds of millions, if not billions of dollars in financial losses. Mitigation and remediate efforts were swift, thankfully, but new ransomware is being developed every day.

NotPetya

2017 was a banner year of sorts when it comes to cyber attacks, as the NotPetya incident would prove. In another ransomware attack, NotPetya demanded $300 in Bitcoin to decrypt the files on your computer. However, the range and scope of this attack is something that has to be seen to be believed. This resulted in logistical shutdowns, government offices being rendered inoperable, and many organizations going offline until they could remediate the problem. It is estimated that NotPetya’s damages come in at an estimated $10 billion.

Equifax Data Breach

Equifax’s compromise by a set of bad actors is one of the most damaging cyber attacks to come about in American history. Vulnerabilities to the technology infrastructure were noted as far back as 2015, but 2017 saw the company disclosing the breach and exposure of around 150 million customers’ personal data, including social security numbers and other sensitive records. Equifax was slapped with around $300 million in fines from the Federal Trade Commission, but the damage from this attack could be catastrophic for decades to come.

SolarWinds Attack

SolarWinds is one of the leading providers of software in the logistical and supply chain management sector. September 2019 saw one of the most devastating cyber attacks to come about from the use of a single software provider. A malicious bit of code was installed alongside an update, meaning SolarWinds customers were leaving an open door for hackers internationally. It is tough to give an exact estimate of the damages incurred from this attack. However, it is estimated that around 11% of the annual revenue for most organizations affected by the breach was lost.

US Office of Personnel Management Data Breach

Nothing gets the blood running colder than a government office being breached by bad actors. A 2015 cyber attack saw the United States OPM compromised, with some far reaching implications. Personal identification information, or PII, was compromised as a result of the breach, with security clearances and fingerprints being included among the materials. This meant that agents operating overseas were compromised, placing a great amount of risk and danger on these people.

Solar Sunrise

In something right out of a science fiction movie, 1998 saw one of the most chilling cyber attacks waged against a government. A series of intrusions occurred across the United States, targeting military systems and other vital infrastructure. Initially, the breach was noted as the work of foreign advanced persistent threats. However, the truth is a bit more mundane, albeit at the expense of exposing some of the inherent flaws of the United States technology infrastructure of the time. The culprits of the attack were teenagers, a pair of 16-year-old boys hailing from California. The attack itself didn’t cause any significant damage, but it left the American government quite shaken. Further steps would be taken to guarantee that the technology powering the United States military was suitably hardened in the aftermath.

Conficker

One of the recent developments in the world of hacking is the distributed denial of service attack, or DDoS. These attacks typically employ thousands, if not millions, of concurrent connections to force a network to its knees. When properly aimed, this can outright cripple infrastructure in a matter of moments, leaving vital services down until the attack relents. Five variants of the Conficker virus, a piece of malware developed for this express cause, were deployed throughout 2008. While these attacks followed typical patterns, their actual scale left cybersecurity professionals scrambling as they disabled computer networks in the French Navy, the UK Ministry of Defence, and the German Bundeswehr, among others. The total of the damages can’t be realistically assessed, but we’re looking at millions of dollars at the minimum.

Mirai Botnet

As a former security professional, nothing gets your dander up like exposing an Internet of Things device to a secure network. While the network itself can be hardened, these devices are rarely secured themselves, leading to a potential attack vector. Mirai’s spread and deployment left massive swathes of the internet down for the count, with sites like Twitter, Github, Reddit, and Netflix going down. Further, Rutgers University’s network was compromised from 2014 to 2016. A total cost breakdown hasn’t been given in the wake of Mirai, but this cyber attack likely cost the world a sum starting in the hundreds of millions.

Epsilon Data Breach

Data breaches are notably quite difficult to ascertain, speaking from experience. You have to look for proof of the compromise, which is difficult because hackers cover their tracks quite well. Most security professionals will have ways of tracing the steps and scope of an attack. The Epsilon data breach left an eye-watering $4 billion in damages when all was said and done. Epsilon is an email marketing firm, and they were able to compromise their client database and, subsequently, the nearly 250 million email addresses those clients possessed. This is a poster child for all the wrong ways of acting after an attack, with Epsilon’s clients taking up to a week to alert their customers of the breach.

Guardians of Peace

You wouldn’t think a dumb comedy movie would result in a foreign government attacking a movie studio. However, the Guardians of Peace, a North Korean APT group, compromised Sony Picture’s network in 2014. The aftermath of this attack exposed thousands of emails, salary information, and the personal identification information of around 4,000 employees. Total estimates can’t be given for the damages, but the attack itself did quite a bit to tarnish public opinion when it came to Sony Pictures.

Mother of All Breaches

I couldn’t begin to assign a value to this one. This is, bar none, the biggest cyber attack in all of history. An estimated 26 billion records, amounting to around 12 terabytes of information, comprise the Mother of All Breaches, or MOAB. MOAB isn’t a new attack, thankfully, but rather a meticulous compilation of the various records stolen from data breaches over the years. Sites like LinkedIn, Twitter, Deezer, Adobe, Canva, Dailymotion, and Dropbox are among the affected parties. The sheer size and scale of this attack haven’t been fully grasped, and cybersecurity experts are still assessing the scope of the records exposed.

Yahoo Data Breach

Come 2013, Yahoo was one of the old giants of the dotcom bubble. While much of their luster had been lost in the wake of Google’s rise to prominence, they were still a fixture in popular zeitgeist thanks to the stock ticker and email services. The cyber attacks on Yahoo occurred throughout 2013 and 2014, but it would take a further two years for news to make it to the public about the extent of the attack. Nearly 200 million records were exposed in the attack, with the perpetrator, a member of Russia’s FSB, facing five years in prison and $2.25 million in fines.

2024 US Telecomm Hack

Salt Typhoon is one of the most sophisticated hacker groups in existence, and they showed their reach fairly quickly during the fall of 2024. A sophisticated zero-day attack leveraging a vulnerability in network devices allowed the group to access text messages, calls, emails, and more from over a million users across Verizon, AT&T, T-Mobile, and Lumen Technologies. Presidential candidates Donald Trump and Kamala Harris were among those affected, with a terrifying implication on what that means for the security of most telecomm organizations in the United States.

BNB Chain

Out of all the cyber attacks covered, this is the first to target cryptocurrency. However, it is certainly worth mentioning the scope and size of the attack. Nearly $570 million in funds were extracted thanks to an exploit in the BNB Chain with Binance users being heavily affected. Taking place across 2022, this is just one of many attacks that leverage cryptocurrency to steal. It does raise some valid concerns about the overall safety of the exchanges in question.

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