The top 10 hacks of 2015

6. Premera Blue Cross

The second health insurance provider on the list, Premera Blue Cross revealed that it was the victim of a cyber attack back in March. According to the company, as many as 11 million customers had their information breached as part of the hack.

Premera said data such as banking details, Social Security information, birth dates, and even clinical information was stolen. In fact, while the Anthem hack was larger by scale, it didn't include medical information, making the Premera hack the largest to involve medical data to date.

Around 6 million of the people whose information was stolen were residents of Washington state, and included employees from Amazon, Microsoft and Starbucks.

7. LastPass

A password management service like LastPass is probably the last account you want to be hacked. Unfortunately, that's exactly what happened earlier this year, as LastPass disclosed in June that it had been breached.

LastPass

While the service did detect an intrusion on its servers, it reported that passwords for other services stored in its database should be safe. The hackers did take email addresses, password reminders, and authentication hashes, as well as master passwords. Impacted users were instructed to immediately change their master password when they were informed of the hack. LastPass also said the authentication hashes that were stolen should be encrypted strongly enough to prevent hackers from using them to access accounts.

It didn't disclose how many people were affected by the breach, and anyone with a LastPass account should have changed their password to the service at the time.

8. UCLA Health

The UCLA Health hack, disclosed in July of this year, is the third such breach on this list, resulting in an unsettling trend of health care provider systems being compromised more frequently. In this instance, hackers gained access to the personal information of a hefty 4.5 million users.

Information like names, Social Security and Medicare numbers, physical addresses, and health plan IDs were all potentially stolen.

The hackers first slipped into the system in September of 2014, and around a month later the computers detected suspicious activity. At that point, UCLA called in the help of the FBI, and in May, the university discovered the hackers accessed computers housing sensitive records.

UCLA says it's not sure if any records were actually stolen, but if the hackers successfully breached the system, there's a good chance they were.

9. Carphone Warehouse

UK phone store Carphone Warehouse disclosed in August that it suffered a hack, reporting that around 2.4 million customers may have had their personal information compromised. Not only that, but the retailer also warned the encrypted credit card details of around 90,000 people may have been taken.

Carphone Warehouse

(Credit: Wikimedia Commons)

While in other cases on this list companies and agencies waited months to disclose a hack, Carphone disclosed the hack to customers days after discovering it.

Among the information stolen were names, dates of birth, addresses and bank details. Customers whose information was compromised in the attack were contacted by Carphone Warehouse, and if a customer didn't hear from the company, they don't need to worry.

10. VTech

All of the hacks up till now had one thing in common - they're prime target was adults. The VTech hack, however, raised the creepy factor to a whole new level as it exposed the personal information of 6.4 million children.

As part of the hack, the company's "Learning Lodge" app store and "Kid Connect" messaging system were breached. According to VTech, information about children's names, gender and birth dates was accessed. Data was also stolen about many of the children's parents, including names, mailing addresses, encrypted passwords and secret questions and answers for password retrieval.

While the attack is horribly scary, especially for parents, it will hopefully prompt toy companies like VTech to take a serious look at their security measures. The hack, according to some experts, should also serve as a wake up call for families.

Christian is a writer who's covered technology for many years, for sites including Tom's Guide, Android Central, iMore, CNN, Business Insider and BGR, as well as TechRadar.

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