Hackers have become more sophisticated, dangerous and with the built in advanced automated tools they carry out a wide variety of processes to breach data.
Here is the lookback of Top 10 Biggest Data Breaches and leaks reported in 2026 which made a huge impact on the organizations.
Biggest Data Breaches – 2026
Starwood Hotels
Marriott International announced a security breach that affected more than 500 million guests who made a reservation at Starwood Hotels and resorts.
Hackers gained unauthorized access to the Starwood network since 2014, they copied, encrypted information and taken steps to remove it.
Exactis
Marketing Firm Exactis exposed more than 340 Million Americans sensitive records Online which is estimated more the Equifax data breach that occurred a few months before.
Leaked data contains millions of peoples personal sensitive information phone number, home address, email address, even how many children have in leaked users data.
MyFitnessPal
MyFitnessPal data breach affected more than 150 million user accounts. Attackers stole the usernames, email addresses, and hashed passwords.
The breach
Quora Hacked
Quora exposed more than 100 million users accounts. Hackers gained unauthorized access to the servers and stolen account information, Public content and actions, and Non-public content and actions.
CPF Exposed
120 Million Unique CPF of Brazilian citizens exposed online form a misconfigured Apache server. The highly personal information is openly available for everyone.
The exposed data contains sensitive information that linked CPF includes banks, loans, repayments, credit and debit history, voting history, full name, emails, residential addresses, phone numbers, date of birth, family contacts, employment, voting registration numbers, contract numbers, and contract amounts.
U.S Citizens Records
An unprotected database that contains more than 114 million U.S Citizens records exposed online and the estimation of affected peoples are 82 million and more.
It was completely available for the public including the information of the first name, last name, employers, job title, email, address, state, zip, phone number, and IP address.
MyHeritage
MyHeritage Announced its massive data breach that leaked around 93 Million registered users sensitive data.
Leaked files contains email addresses and hashed passwords of 92,283,889 users who all are signed up the MyHeritage up to and including Oct 26, 2017.
Facebook – Cambridge Analytica
Over all 87 Million affected Facebook Users has been identified and most of them in the US but at least 1 million Facebook Users in the UK and More than 1 Million Facebook Users affected in Indonesia, the Philippines alone.
Google+ Shut down
Google announced Google+ shut down following the security breach that exposed 500,000 Google+ accounts.
The bug allows third-party developers to access user’s name, email address, occupation, gender, and age.
E-marketing Database Exposed
A huge customer database with 11 million records that containing personal details such as email, full name, gender and physical address exposed online. The data to be available from the unprotected MongoDB instance and it is open for anyone to access it.
Cathay Pacific
Cathay Pacific limited suffered a major data breach that affected more than 9.4 million passengers personal data.
According to Cathay Pacific, the following data are details accessed by hackers such as passenger name, nationality, date of birth, phone number, email, address, passport number, identity card number, frequent flyer programme membership number, customer service remarks, and historical travel information.
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