Incidents from
In December 2015, the instant messaging application Trillian suffered a data breach. The breach became known in July 2016 and exposed various personal data attributes including names, email addresses and passwords stored as salted MD5 hashes.
A two-week Anonymous-claimed DDoS campaign knocked Turkish banks' online and card-payment systems offline and hit the NIC.tr DNS infrastructure with a 40 Gbps flood, disrupting roughly 400,000 .tr domains nationwide.
The Russia-linked Sandworm group used spear-phishing, BlackEnergy3, and KillDisk to remotely flip breakers at three Ukrainian regional electricity distribution companies, cutting power to approximately 230,000 customers for 1–6 hours. It is the first publicly acknowledged successful cyberattack on an electric power grid in history.
In approximately late 2015, the maker of "performance marketing products" QuinStreet had a number of their online assets compromised. The attack impacted 28 separate sites, predominantly technology forums such as flashkit.com, codeguru.com and webdeveloper.com (view a full list of sites).
In December 2015, the service for creating and running free Minecraft servers known as Aternos suffered a data breach that impacted 1.4 million subscribers. The data included usernames, email and IP addresses and hashed passwords.
In late 2015, the technology and social site DaniWeb suffered a data breach. The attack resulted in the disclosure of 1.1 million accounts including email and IP addresses which were also accompanied by salted MD5 hashes of passwords.
A hacker calling himself Hacker Buba breached Sharjah-based InvestBank, demanded a $3 million ransom, and then leaked tens of thousands of customer records including credit card numbers, passports and account details when the bank refused to pay.
In late 2015, the anime community known as Nihonomaru had their vBulletin forum hacked and 1.7 million accounts exposed. The compromised data included email and IP addresses, usernames and salted hashes of passwords.
In approximately late 2015, the programming forum at programmingforums.org suffered a data breach resulting in the exposure of 707k unique user records. The data contained email and IP addresses, usernames and salted MD5 hashes of passwords.
In December 2015, the forum for discussing naked celebrity photos known as "The Fappening" (named after the iCloud leaks of 2014) was compromised and 179k accounts were leaked. Exposed member data included usernames, email addresses and salted hashes of passwords.
A SQL-injection attack against Hong Kong toymaker VTech's Learning Lodge service exposed the personal data of 6.4 million children and nearly 5 million parent accounts, becoming the first major breach to focus on data about minors.
In November 2015, almost 270k accounts from the MajorGeeks support forum were breached. The accounts were being actively sold and traded online and included email addresses, salted password hashes and IP addresses.
In November 2015, the dating website Beautiful People was hacked and over 1.1M accounts were leaked. The data was being traded in underground circles and included a huge amount of personal information related to dating.
In November 2015, the US internet and cable TV provider Comcast suffered a data breach that exposed 590k customer email addresses and plain text passwords. A further 27k accounts appeared with home addresses with the entire data set being sold on underground forums.
In November 2015, an Ancestry service known as RootsWeb suffered a data breach. The breach was not discovered until late 2017 when a file containing almost 300k email addresses and plain text passwords was identified.
In late 2015, the online penpal site InterPals had their website hacked and 3.4 million accounts exposed. The compromised data included email addresses, geographical locations, birthdates and salted hashes of passwords.
In November 2015, the online chatroom known as "xat" was hacked and 6 million user accounts were exposed. Used as a chat engine on websites, the leaked data included usernames, email and IP addresses along with hashed passwords.
In November 2015, the forum software maker vBulletin suffered a serious data breach. The attack lead to the release of both forum user and customer accounts totalling almost 519k records.
In November 2015, the gaming website dedicated to classic DOS games Abandonia suffered a data breach resulting in the exposure of 776k unique user records. The data contained email and IP addresses, usernames and salted MD5 hashes of passwords.
In late 2015, the gaming website R2Games was hacked and more than 2.1M personal records disclosed. The vBulletin forum included IP addresses and passwords stored as salted hashes using a weak implementation enabling many to be rapidly cracked.
In October 2015, the torrent site Mac-Torrents was hacked and almost 94k usernames, email addresses and passwords were leaked. The passwords were hashed with MD5 and no salt.
In October 2015, the PHP discussion board PHP Freaks was hacked and 173k user accounts were publicly leaked. The breach included multiple personal data attributes as well as salted and hashed passwords.
In approximately October 2015, the manga website Go Games suffered a data breach. The exposed data included 3.4M customer records including email and IP addresses, usernames and passwords stored as salted MD5 hashes. Go Games did not respond when contacted about the incident.
In approximately October 2015, the online gaming forum known as Gamerzplanet was hacked and more than 1.2M accounts were exposed. The vBulletin forum included IP addresses and passwords stored as salted hashes using a weak implementation enabling many to be rapidly cracked.