It has recently emerged that personal details from more than 530 million Facebook accounts have been posted to a hacking forum and are on sale for very little money. Information such as email addresses, phone numbers and dates of birth have been breached and, according to CyberNews, the data is likely to have been on sale since last June. It has been reported that 32 million of these accounts were based in the US, and 11 million in the UK. Facebook has responded by stating the data breach was related to an old hack, which was "found and fixed" in August 2019. But as most people don't regularly change email addresses or phone numbers, it remains a security risk for many. The leak could lead to a heavy fine in Europe, where the EU imposed strict General Data Protection Regulation (GDPR) rules from May 2018, unless Facebook can prove that the breach took place before those data regulations were put in place. Ireland's data protection agency launched its own investigation into the data breach last week.

But Facebook is not the only business to have a data breach come to light in the past year. Click or scroll through the major company and government hacks and data breaches that have put our valuable information at risk.