5 Times Top Search Engines got Hacked

since the creation of the web, we use search engines very frequently for almost all everything today, whether it's related to our business, studies, complex calculations or for research we always run to our favorite search engines to find out quick answers. cybercriminals are always on the hunt to sneak into almost anything online. In today's blog find out whether your favorite search engine ever got hacked.

#1 Ask.com ask was founded by Garrett Gruener and David Warthen in 1996. it is based in the United States of America and its headquarter is in California. it has approximately 1000 workers as of this post, its current global ranking is around 400. while in the United States it stands at around 450. it is a platform where people can ask almost any question about anything and they get their replies and answers from different websites and people. ask had developed its toolbar which is supported by all web browsers. in 2016 unknown hackers were able to breach into its toolbar security by the update process, which would direct its users to a malicious file. upon clicking on it would install malware on the computer. this sort of attack happened twice on ask toolbar in the same month. though it was quickly discovered and removed by the cyber police, we do not the extent of the infection. 

#2. Baidu is China's google for stater. it was founded in 2000 and currently has about 45000+ employees. its headquarter is in Beijing China. around 12 January 2010, it got hacked by a group identified themselves as the Iranian  Cyber Army for approximately 4 hours. they were able to breach Baidu's security and infected the site with "denial of service" which would simply redirect its visitors to a black screen with Iranian Flag and some message in Persian. the chines officials, however, said that they did not infect any of the systems. some people speculated that it was the response from Chines users starting a hashtag #CN4Iran, which was showing support from China about the reforms in Iran. though the real reason for the hack is still unknown.

#3 Yandex is Russia's most favorite search engine. it was founded in 1997 by Arkady Volozh and few others. its headquarter is located in Moscow Rusia. it has approximately 10000 employees and ranks number 1 in Rusia while 13 globally. it was supposedly attacked by western intelligence agencies, the malware used was 'Regin'. It was used by the United States, United Kingdom, Canada, Australia, and New Zealand the code word for these countries was "Five Eyes" were the above countries used it as a shared intelligence system. however, none of them commented on the attack. the main purpose of the attack was to spy on users' accounts and not to steal any intellectual property. Yandex said that it detected the attack and completely removed the malware in early-stage and no account was exposed to the attack.

#4 Google is without any doubt today's tech giant. it was founded by Larry page and is based in Mountain View, CA, the United States. in 2010 google disclosed in a blog post that it was attacked in 2009 by Chinese hackers, based in Beijing. although Google did not share any other information about the attack, the US official said that they have stolen sensitive data. and they were also trying to get the source code of different other online service providers.

#5 Yahoo got hacked two times, once in 2013, which was disclosed by Yahoo in 2016. and the second time it got attacked in 2014 which was also acknowledge by yahoo in 2016.  the 2014 attack was suspected to have affected more than 500million yahoo accounts while the attack which happened in 2013 initially to have affected more than one billion Yahoo users. however latter in 2017 yahoo confirmed that all of its 3billion users were compromised. the first discovery of its security breach surfaced when a website on the dark web presented over 200million user names and passwords for sale on the dark web. the hacker who identified himself as the "Peace Of Mind' mentioned that he was selling the accounts from 2015 privately. this attack is known as the biggest cyber-attack over the internet. because of this attack, yahoo was supposed to be acquired by Verizon at around 4.5bn dollars, however, after the attack disclosure, they settled down for only 350million dollars.