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It's amazing how little the breaches matter, too. We like to gnash our teeth whenever a breach happens, yet somehow the breaches matter less than, say, getting into a fender bender.

To a point. Imagine if some crafty hacker leaks Slack's entire message history across all companies. Think of the chaos.

Kind of weird to consider that maybe we haven't seen a catastrophic breach yet.

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Ashley-Madison was a pretty serious breach in that respect.

People died because of that one:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ashley_Madison_data_breach#Imp...

Just to add on top of that the OPM breach was and still is pretty serious. A lot of personal information for a lot of people was leaked and is easily in the hands of malicious state and individual actors. The sheer scale of the breach and the amount of information out there can be leveraged by a lot of people.

[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Office_of_Personnel_Management...

[1] https://www.wired.com/2016/10/inside-cyberattack-shocked-us-...

[2] http://www.slate.com/articles/technology/future_tense/2015/0...

The impact is often not seen immediately as databases of leaked accounts can be used for further hacks (impersonation, social engineering, blackmailing etc.) I'd attribute that to the lack of studies and difficulty to trace hacks back to leaks.

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