The 7 different Continents that you can get hacked in
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Africa
There have been concerns raised over what is being described as South Africa's biggest hack ever where as many as thirty million identity numbers and other financial and personal information belonging to South Africans may have become compromised. The information has been hacked and leaked on the Internet and includes sensitive information such as the thirteen digit ID number, personal income, age, race, marital status, addresses, employers and more.
Asia
Hackers have stolen personal information about 1.5 million people in a major cyber attack on the Singapore government’s health database. More than a quarter of the city state’s population was affected by the “deliberate, targeted and well-planned” attack, in which data on patients who visited clinics between May 2015 and 4 July this year was illegally accessed and copied. The prime minister was among 160,000 victims of the hack whose outpatient medication data was compromised.
Europe
More than a third of people in the UK believe that losing money or personal information over the internet is now “unavoidable”, a survey has found, in a further sign of growing public concern about online privacy. The research, carried out by Britain’s National Cyber Security Centre, part of digital intelligence agency GCHQ, also revealed that 70 per cent of the public believe they will be a victim of cyber crime in the next two years. The findings come as business leaders and tech companies are under growing pressure from regulators in Europe and the US to tighten security and improve their standards for handling personal data.
South America
Latin America is under cyber attack. Cyber attacks are on the rise globally, but Latin America is seeing more than its fair share. According to an Eset Latin American Security Report (2017), the number of reported ransomware cases grew 131% in 2016. In Brazil alone, cyber attacks increased 197% in 2015, and a survey of Brazilian companies revealed that one-third had experienced a cybercrime (Trend Micro).
North America
Hackers have exposed the personal information of 110 million Americans -- roughly half of the nation's adults -- in the last 12 months alone. That massive number, tallied for CNNMoney by Ponemon Institute researchers, is made even more mind-boggling by the amount of hacked accounts: up to 432 million. The exact number of exposed accounts is hard to pin down, because some companies -- such as AOL (AOL) and eBay (EBAY) -- aren't fully transparent about the details of their cyber breaches. But that's the best estimate available with the data tracked by the Identity Theft Resource Center and CNNMoney's own review of corporate disclosures.
Antarctica
Two Romanian citizens accused of hacking into the National Science Foundation’s Amundsen-Scott South Pole Station science research facility were arrested in a joint FBI/Romanian police operation last month. On May 3, 2003, an anonymous email was simultaneously received by the Foundation’s U.S. Antarctic Program network operations center and by technical staff at the South Pole. “I’ve hacked into the server of your South Pole Research Station,” it read. “Pay me off, or I will sell the station’s data to another country.” The email contained data found only on South Pole computer systems, demonstrating that it was not a hoax. The threat hinted that the South Pole network had been widely penetrated, potentially with harmful software that would cause harm if triggered by the hacker. NSF and its contractor, Raytheon Polar Services Company, immediately isolated the entire station’s computer network to prevent future moves by the hacker. For part of each day the station is naturally isolated from the Internet because of limited satellite coverage, and by the time satellite access returned the next day the NSF team had locked down the station while beginning to restore essential services such as email and telemedicine and to isolate the known hacked computers from the local network.
Australia
Each year in Australia there are thousands of cyber breaches to businesses. While most of these breaches affect smaller businesses, occasionally there are “major” cyber breaches that impact large organisations and a huge number of people. For Australian businesses, knowing how these cyber breaches occurred can help them protect their own data by ensuring they don’t allow the same thing happen to them. Below, we’ve listed the major cyber breaches in Australia that have had the biggest impact on the largest number of people.
