The hackers won in 2014. It seemed that not a week would go by where someone wasn’t hacked or the subject of a similar attack, with many companies brought to their knees under the weight of mischievous cyber-criminals looking to score Internet Points for causing the most wanton online devastation.
As the year comes to a close, it’s time to look back on what should surely be rebranded “The Year of the Hackers,” and take note of just how many problems they have caused for us, major corporations and celebrities.
Here are the hackers’ worst (or best, if you’re a hacker) hits of 2014:
2014: The Year of the Hacker
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'The Fappening' Had Hollywood Raging
A shitstorm was whirling around Hollywood earlier this year when someone managed to obtain a huge selection of private images of actresses from Apple's iCloud, before inevitably distributing them online.
Far from being pleasant photographs of cats or other Instagram-friendly fodder, the images saw the likes of Jennifer Lawrence, Kaley Cuoco and Kirsten Dunst in the nude, and for a while the internet became a gigantic circlejerk of users passing along the stash across blogs and social networking sites.
The hack was dubbed 'The Fappening,' and the internet was subsequently divided into three camps; those who saw the hack as an abhorrent invasion of privacy but who had probably seen the photographs anyway due to their sheer omnipresence, those who sat hunched over their laptops for several days masturbating themselves into oblivion like voyeuristic perverts, or those who were rich, famous, beautiful and were desperately trying to prevent the photographs of their private parts from spreading further across the web.
Such is the fickle nature of the internet that The Fappening was eventually forgotten about, and the mostly female actresses who were involved continued with their careers without a hitch.
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Lizard Squad Takes Down PSN and Xbox Live on Christmas Day
You're 16 years old. You've just woken up on Christmas Day to find that your parents have bought you a brand new PlayStation 4/Xbox One. You hook it up to your TV with giddy excitement but, much to your dismay, you're informed that PlayStation Network/Xbox Live is "undergoing maintenance," and you can't access your console's online service. You look to the Heavens, fist clenched and raised in the air. "Damn you, Lizard Squad! Damn you all to Hell!" You bellow. Christmas is ruined. Baby Jesus is crying.
Hacking group Lizard Squad were reportedly behind the DDoS (Distributed Denial of Service) attacks on Christmas Day this year, which saw the online servers for the PS4, Xbox One, PS3 and Xbox 360 come grinding to a halt. While DDoS attacks don't necessarily class as hacks (they're actually the result of a multitude of bots increasing traffic from multiple sources in an attempt to shut down an online network), they're still downright annoying enough to be featured on this list.
While PSN and Xbox Live have achieved some stability at the time of this writing, with Xbox Live and Microsoft doing a better job of getting their online network back in working order (go figure), we should still spare a thought for those who wanted to play with their new consoles on Christmas Day, but who were mercilessly slapped down by those pesky lizards.
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'The Snappening'
After 'The Fappening' came the slightly less interesting 'The Snappening,' in which Snapchat users found the images they had sent using the ephemeral messaging app being leaked online.
Due to the nature of the app, many of the images leaked were naked selfies, which had been obtained through a third-party Snapchat application called SnapSaved.com. SnapSaved issued an apology to its users, though Snapchat backed the fuck away from the debacle, distancing themselves from any wrongdoing by issuing a statement that essentially told its users that it was all their fault for using a third-party Snapchat app, which was technically true but didn't make those who had their penis/vagina slapped on the internet feel any better.
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Confidential User Information Leaked via eBay
We lost count of how many times we were told to change our passwords in 2014 due to the sheer amount of hackings/false flags that took place, but one incident which left us truly concerned was the news that eBay had been hacked, and the hackers had managed to obtain a batch of confidential user information includes names, addresses and passwords.
eBay was slow off the mark to react to the hacking, releasing a statement that revealed the company had only noticed a hack had taken place two weeks after the fact. The company urged its users to change their passwords immediately, though many were concerned that the hackers would have already amassed enough information in the two weeks it took for eBay to learn of the attack that it wouldn't matter.
Fortunately, at the time of this writing, the results of the hack were seemingly fruitless, and everyone has continued to merrily bid on items on the site.
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TweetDeck Hack was the Silliest Hack of the Year
Whereas the other hacks featured in this list have caused major headaches for the companies/individuals involved, the TweetDeck hack was more funny than it was embarrassing.
After a 19-year-old Australian boy attempted to work out how to send a ♥ symbol using the Twitter app, he learned that he could send coded script in a tweet which would force other accounts to retweet his message automatically, or copy his tweet and send it from their own accounts.
Cue a deluge of notable accounts, including those for the BBC and New York Times, reposting the young man's tweet along with posting ♥'s, simple messages such as "YO!" or "HACKED!" and, due to one bright spark, tweeting the lyrics to Rick Astley's 'Never Gonna Give You Up.' Yes, Rickrolling made a return.
The 19-year-old eventually alerted TweetDeck to the problem and it was rectified, though not before everyone had their fun.
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The Interview Causes Friction Between the US and North Korea
In 2014 Seth Rogen went from starring in stoner comedies to pissing off murderous man-child Kim Jong-un, with his and Evan Goldberg's North Korea-baiting The Interview allegedly leading to an unprecedented Sony Pictures hack, resulting in a huge selection of confidential files being leaked.
There's been a ton of disputes regarding whether or not N. Korea was actually behind the attack (it seems unlikely considering that they only garnered nationwide internet access in 2010), but it certainly caused friction between the US and the hermit kingdom, with the counter pinning the blame on America when the country was subsequently hit by a massive DDoS attack.
Whether or not the Sony Pictures hack was conducted as a result of The Interview, it still proved to be a massive dilemma for the company as leaked emails revealed some embarrassing omissions by Sony's head honchos, unfinished scripts were posted online and a number of movies were made easily accessible on torrent sites.
2014 was a year Sony Pictures would rather forget, but on the bright side, The Interview pulled in some impressive numbers when it was eventually released on-demand (after Sony said that they wouldn't show it at all out of fear of a terrorist retaliation from North Korea), becoming Sony's most-downloaded title of all time and raking in $15 million, excluding the amount it garnered from its limited release in theaters.
