Cyber Attacks and Public Embarrassment: A Survey of Some Notable Hacks

We hear it all too often in the media: an organization is attacked, its data, often containing personally identifying information, is made public, and a hacking group emerges to claim credit. In this excerpt, we discuss how such groups operate and describe the details of a few major cyber-attacks of this sort in the wider context of how they occurred. We feel that understanding how such groups have operated in the past will give organizations ideas of how to defend against them in the future.