Five major companies that were hit by data breaches in 2018

Data breaches tend to affect a company’s finances, reputation and stock. Here are five leading companies which were impacted by data security breaches this year:

Marriott

Last Friday, Marriott International (MAR) disclosed a data breach that compromised the personal information of over 500 million guests who made reservations at its Starwood properties. An investigation revealed that the guest reservation database had been hacked way back in 2014 and the breach had remained undetected for quite a while. The news led to a 5% drop in Marriott’s stock at the time.

As of 2:20 pm ET on Tuesday, Marriott’s shares were down 3.3%.

Amazon

Last month, during the Thanksgiving week, Amazon (AMZN) was affected by a technical error which exposed the names and email addresses of customers. The company did not disclose any additional details on the incident but said that it had fixed the issue and notified its customers. The stock did not take much of a hit on the incident.

As of 2:20 pm ET, Amazon’s stock was down 3.8%.

Google

In October, Alphabet’s (GOOGL) Google division revealed that the personal information of around 500,000 Google + users might have been exposed due to a software bug. The breach was traced back to 2015 and had continued till March 2018 when internal investigators spotted and fixed it.

The exposed data included full names, birthdays and email addresses but Google reportedly did not find any evidence of misuse. Alphabet decided to shut down Google + for consumers as part of its new privacy efforts but the fact that the company chose to keep the incident under wraps did not reflect well on it.

Alphabet’s stock was down 3.3% as of 2:20 pm ET on Tuesday.

Data breach drives final nail in coffin for Google +

Facebook

Facebook (FB) took a major hit this year in March with the Cambridge Analytica data privacy issue in which the information of around 87 million users were said to have been taken without their consent for political and commercial reasons. Facebook lost $50 billion from its market cap in just two days after the incident was revealed.

The social media company suffered another blow in October when hackers stole access tokens from 50 million accounts by exploiting flaws in the “View As” option. This incident too hurt the stock slightly at the time. Facebook’s stock has dropped several times this year due to various reasons from security issues to a weak outlook.

As of 2:20 pm ET, Facebook’s shares were down 1.1%.

Facebook faces a fine of $1.63 billion for recent security breach

Orbitz

Online travel portal Orbitz, a subsidiary of Expedia Group (EXPE), was hit by a massive data breach in March, which compromised the personal information of 880,000 customers. Sensitive information such as date of birth, email ids, addresses and phone numbers were suspected to have been stolen and the company offered customers a free credit monitoring and identity protection package for one year to help prevent misuse of the stolen data.

As of 2:25 pm ET, Expedia’s stock was down 0.61%.

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