According to Tony Robbins, “Every problem is a gift- without problems we would not grow.”   VerticalScope has had two monumental breaches in two years.    VerticalScope is a diverse privately held multi-platform media company in Toronto, Canada, which is in the business of website acquisitions, vertical marketing and unique content generation.  Their first breached occurred in early February of 2016 and disclosed 45 million user accounts, drifting meticulously onto the Dark Web. “Given the massive scale of this breach, it is also likely that VerticalScope stored all of their data on interconnected or even the same servers as there is no other way to explain a theft on such a large scale,” Leakedsource.com said.  VerticalScope boasts of 105 million unique visitors on its History Page.  The second VerticalScope breach was detected this past October by Alex Holden of Hold Security. Although the breach disclosed 2.7 million and less than 10 websites were comprised, the intrusion method was not very noisy, using backdoors.  Companies that had massive data breaches are:

• 45M VerticalScope 
• 46M-90M TJX Companies, Inc
• 50M Evernote
• 56M Home Depot
• 60M-250M Epsilon
• 65M Tumblr
• 68M Dropbox 
• 69-80M Anthem
• 76M NARA
• 98M Rambler
• 102M Sony Online Entertainment
• 110M Target Stores
• 130M Heartland Payment System
• 145M Equifax
• 152M Adobe 
• 165M LinkedIn 
• 171M VKontakte
• 360M My Space 
• 412M FriendFinder Network
• 3B Yahoo

There are significant relationships between operational costs,  risk tolerance, cyber security professionals and cyber security training.  Cyber attacks can be both thunderous and stealthy. Paulo Coelho, author of “The Alchemist” has been quoted as saying, “Everything that happens once can never happen again. But everything that happens twice will surely happen a third time.”

^{Resources
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Morgan, L. “List of data breaches and cyber attacks in June 2016 (289,150,000+ records leaked).” 21 June 2016,  IT Governance,  https//www.itgovernance.co.uk/blog/list-of-data-breaches-and-cyber-attacks-in-june-2016-135000000-records-leaked/. Accessed 07 November 2017.
Olenick, D. “Leakedsource.com find 45 Million VerticalScope leaked user records.” 5 June 2016,  SC Magazine, https//www.scmagazine.com/leakedsourcecom-finds-45m-leaked-verticalscope-user-records/article/529437/. Accessed 09 November 2017.
Paganini, P. “In February Verticalscope platform was hacked and  more than 45 Million passwords from 1,000 websites running on it have been leaked online.” 15 June 2016, Security Affairs, http//securityaffairs.co/wordpress/48404/deep-web/verticalscope-data-breach.html. Accessed 07  November 2017.
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Trend Micro “45 Million User Records Leaked Online in Recent VerticalScope Breach.” 18 June 2016, Trend Micro, https//www.trendmicro.com/vinfo/us/security/news/cybercrime-and-digital-threats/45-million-user-records-leaked-in-verticalscope-breach. Accessed 09 November 2017.}