Equifax announced Thursday that a data breach between May and July affected more than 140 million Americans. Such hacks can be devastating. Since 2005, they've grown to affect millions of people.
Some of the earliest data breaches in the United States, dating back to 2005, occurred at colleges.
The first happened at George Mason University in Fairfax in January 2005, according to the Privacy Rights Clearinghouse.
A hacker, who attacked the university's main identification server, compromised the names, pictures and social security numbers of about 32,000 students and staff.
The first hack to compromise more than 1 million records wasn't at a school or government agency but a business.
In March 2005, hackers stole credit card information for more than 1.4 million records from DSW in Columbus, Ohio.
Then the hacks got bigger.
In Tucson, Ariz., hackers exposed more than 40 million credit card accounts from CardSystems Solutions.
Equifax, an Atlanta-based credit monitoring company, is the latest business to experience a large-scale hack.
The company said Thursday "criminals" exploited a U.S. website application between May and July of this year and accessed Social Security numbers and other sensitive information for more than 143 million Americans.
There were breaches at Heartland Payment Systems in 2009, Adobe in 2013, Home Depot in 2014 and Anthem in 2015.
However, none were as big as the Myspace hack in May.
Hackers breached the social media website, and compromised the usernames and passwords for more than 360 million records. It was the biggest data breach in history at the time.
On Sept. 22, Yahoo announced it had been hacked by a "state-sponsored actor," claiming about 500 million records were compromised.
That's more records than there are people in the United States, Mexico and Canada combined.
Until now.
On Wednesday, Yahoo announced it was the victim of a second "state-sponsored" hack in which 1 billion user accounts – most of the company's customers worldwide – were compromised in August 2013.
The latest hack is the largest in history, double in size from three months ago.
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