What Are the World’s Biggest Data Breaches and Hacks?

From the Information Is Beautiful website (updated in May 2022) comes an interactive infographic of over 30,000 records of the world’s biggest data breaches and hacks. The infographic shows different-sized circles from 2022 back to 2004 when AOL had a data breach of 92 million records, considered massive at the time. If you think the SolarWinds hack from December 2020 was one of the biggest hacks ever at 50 million records breached, think again. Between September 2019 and March 2021, Facebook had 953 million records breached in two large breaches, and they had three other breaches, taking them to over one billion reported records breached overall. Hover over any circle in the infographic and you get details about the data breach and approximately how many records were lost. Or filter the list by sector or breach method, or search by company. There’s also a second infographic, “Data Breaches by Data Sensitivity,” which sorts the interactive circles by email addresses, personal details/passwords, credit cards/banking, health/personal data and full/sensitive details. And that list may be even more enlightening.