The five cyberattacks that shook the channel in 2015

The biggest breaches and cyberattacks of the last 12 months

2015 was the year when breaches of household names were blazoned across the media, on an almost weekly basis.

Company after company suffered at the hands of attackers, with victims ranging from governments to online dating sites.

Here is a look at the five attacks that will most stick in the memory for the channel.

1: US government

While it has become commonplace for companies to be hacked, it perhaps came as a shock to some when the US government discovered it had suffered a major breach, which led to the theft of the fingerprints of 5.6 million US citizens.

The Office of Personnel Management and the Department of Defense released a statement in September which said: "Of the 21.5 million individuals whose social security numbers and other sensitive information were impacted by the breach, the subset of individuals whose fingerprints have been stolen has increased from a total of approximately 1.1 million to approximately 5.6 million." According to a Reuters report in June, a "foreign entity or government" was suspected to be behind the attack, with investigators looking at Chinese suspects.

2: TalkTalk

In October, telecoms giant TalkTalk admitted that 156,959 of its customers' personal details were opened following a cyberattack on its site. "Of these customers, 15,656 bank account numbers and sort codes were accessed," TalkTalk said in a statement.

Following the incident, a number of teenage boys were arrested in connection with the attack, according to reports.

3: UK e-tailers

In October CRN revealed that a number of UK e-tailers were hit by Bitcoin-based DDoS attacks which brought many websites down. Scan Computers, Novatech and Aria Technology all encountered website disruption for a short period on 20 October.

Aria then received an email demanding payment of 16.66 Bitcoins (£2,871.43), or the attackers would try to bring the site down for the whole of 22 October. Aria's eponymous boss decided against paying the ransom and instead put up a bounty of £15,000 for any information that would help find the perpetrators. Two days after the original attacks, further e-tailers saw their sites brought down, with Overclockers also reporting a DDoS-based attack.

The DDoS attacks, which demanded money otherwise more would come, were not unique, according to cloud services provider Akamai. One group in particular has become associated with them - the DDoS for Bitcoin (Distributed Denial of Service for Bitcoin), or DD4BC - a group that has been "responsible for a large number of Bitcoin extortion campaigns dating back to 2014", according to Akamai.

4: Ashley Madison

While the DDoS attacks on UK e-tailers seemed to have purely financial incentives behind them, other security hacks appeared to be driven by more personal reasons.

In the summer, Ashley Madison, a dating website for married individuals who wish to cheat on their partners, was hacked and customer data was leaked onto the web. According to Wired, 9.7GB of data was dumped, including the account details of 32 million users.

The hack had far-reaching effects, with Noel Biderman, CEO of Ashley Madison's parent company Avid Life Media, stepping down and intelligence services in China and Russia reportedly using the data released, according to CNN.

5: Dixons Carphone

In the same month as the Ashley Madison hack, Dixons Carphone also suffered a "sophisticated" cyberattack to its Carphone Warehouse arm.

Names, addresses, dates of birth and bank details of 2.4 million customers could have been accessed, and encrypted credit card data of up to 90,000 customers may also have been hacked.

Dixons Carphone chief executive Sebastian James said sorry for the incident.

"We take the security of customer data extremely seriously, and we are very sorry that people have been affected by this attack on our systems," he said.

"We are, of course, informing anyone who may have been affected, and have put in place additional security measures."