New Horizons Blog and Resources

In information security circles, 2014 has been a year of what seems like a never-ending stream of cyberthreats and data breaches, affecting retailers, banks, gaming networks, governments and more.

The calendar year may be drawing to a close, but we can expect that the size, severity and complexity of cyber threats to continue increasing, says Steve Durbin, managing director of the Information Security Forum (ISF), a nonprofit association that assesses security and risk management issues on behalf of its members.

Data breaches had a ton of media attention in 2014, and with good reason: 43% of companies have experienced a data breach in the last year. That number is up 10% from the year before and it’s only expected to rise, according to a report from the Ponemon Institute.

Companies are attacked an average of 16,856 times a year and most incidences aren’t even a blip on our radars. But the big ones are big—huge—and they get a ton of news coverage. So which ones were the biggest of 2014? Here’s a list of the worst of the worst: