The year 2016, has been a rather terrible one for the security sector, as data breaches have become far too common these days. As a result of these cyber attacks, a lot of sensitive user details are floating around on the Internet, and being used for nefarious purposes.But what were some of the biggest data breaches in 2016?

#4 SnapChat Employees Affected

Albeit the vast majority of data breaches affect customers and users of a particular service, things turned out differently for Snapchat

#3 Yahoo Gets Two Mentions

Speaking of tech companies and data breaches, this has been a horrible year for Yahoo. The first incident was reported in September of 2016, when it became apparent that the Company stole information from over 500 million users. Although this hack took place at the end of 2014, Yahoo took their sweet time in acknowledging what happened.

Fast forwarding to just over a week ago, the Company announced an even bigger data breach. Back in 2013, the Company suffered from what has been dubbed the largest data theft in history. One billion Yahoo accounts have been affected by this theft, although additional information remains elusive for the time being. Two major breaches in just over a year do not spell good news for the Company.

#2 National Payment Corporation of India

The nation of India has seen its fair share of problems in 2016. The majority of media attention has been on the Rupee banknote ban, and how cash shortages are affecting the country right now. But that is not the only noteworthy event that residents should be concerned about at this stage.

In October of 2016, the National Payment Corporation received notifications of customer debit cards being used for fraudulent transactions. For now, it is believed that this data breach was made possible by deploying malware and that over 3.2 million debit cards may have been leaked in the process. A lot of cards have been canceled and replaced by new ones every since.

#1 Multiple Email Providers Targeted By Russian Hackers

One of the data breaches that virtually went by unnoticed affected multiple email providers. Russian criminals obtained over 270 million email usernames and passwords, which were given away for free to Russian cyber criminals. This includes accounts from Mail.ru, Yahoo, Hotmail, and Gmail. To his day, it remains unclear how the hackers obtained this information.

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