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​The recent revelation from Yahoo! that every single account on its system at the time of the 2013 data breach was affected in the cyberattack has raised further awareness of the threat from data breaches.

Yahoo! had initially admitted that around one billion of its accounts were compromised in the attack, but new intelligence has revealed that the figure is much closer to three billion.

Although the data breach didn't include payment details or bank account data, it did see passwords, email addresses and telephone numbers put at risk.

Our 2017 Breach Level Index report claims that there were 918 reported data breaches and almost 1.9 billion compromised data records worldwide in the first half of this year, up by 164% from the last six months in 2016.

The new figures revealed by Yahoo! mean that the web services provider tops the charts of the world's most significant security breaches of all time. Here's a rundown of the top ten…

  1. Yahoo! 3 billion, December 2016
  2. Yahoo! 500 million, September 2016
  3. MySpace 360 million May 2016
  4. Equifax, 145.5 million, September 2017
  5. eBay 145 million, May 2014
  6. LinkedIn 100 million, May 2016
  7. AOL, 92 million, October 2007
  8. JP Morgan Chase, 83 million, October 2013
  9. Anthem 80 million, February 2015
  10. Sony PlayStation Network, 77 million, April 2011

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