No one was immune to the impact of cyber criminal activities in 2014. It will be remembered as the year of the Heartbleed bug that caused a vulnerability in the popular OpenSSL cryptographic library; the Poodle attack against outdated SSL 3.0; the sunset of the SHA-1 cryptographic algorithm, which was frequently affected by cyber attacks; and the Shellshock software bug.
Many e-commerce giants, popular smartphone applications, and government and health organizations were also actively attacked by hackers in 2014.