As the world’s cyber security systems are getting more and more advanced, so do the hackers that aim to breach them. The rising number of cyber threats and related incidents have led to tighter IT security measures and emphasized the importance of technology insurance policies. Indeed, these days, insurance companies have specific coverage plans for technology professionals involved in a wide variety of IT services, from data processing to internet service provision or hosting.

To further underscore the significance of defending your business from losses due to online attacks or cybercrimes, here are some examples of major data breaches that occurred within the last few years:

Heartland Payment Systems – Spanning a year from 2008-2009, over 130 million records held by the New Jersey-based payment processor were compromised when cybercriminals exposed credit and debit card information. Such attack was considered the biggest one to ever hit an American company during that time.

Evernote – The note-taking and archiving site suffered an attack on March 2013 that saw email addresses, usernames, and encrypted passwords exposed due to a security breach—more than 50 million according to estimates. Fortunately, Evernote found no financial or user-generated content compromised.

Ubuntu – Using the special MD5 hashing algorithm, hackers were able to scramble some 2 million passwords from Ubuntu user accounts. Security experts unanimously agreed that the way Ubuntu protected its stored passwords was the one to blame, as the latter’s protective strategies were found “inadequate”.