In 2014, this attack was said to impact two-thirds of all US households making this one of the largest breaches in history at that time.
The cyber attack exposed information relating to 82 million household and business accounts and included personal information such as names, email addresses and phone numbers.
In 2015, four men were indicted for the attack (as well as other attacks on other financial institutions) with charges including securities and wire fraud, money laundering and identity theft.
It is believed that login credentials were obtained through tricking users which were then used to access customer information via the mainframe through malware installation.
Hackers also exploited the Heartbleed bug (a vulnerability in OpenSSL) that allowed hackers to steal information that is normally encrypted.
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