Throughout the entirety of last year, companies continuously found themselves crippled due to the high amount of cyber attacks. Back in May, the online auction site, eBay, revealed that hackers had stolen personal information from about 233 million users. This included usernames, passwords and even physical addresses.

In June, Domino’s Pizza was contacted and told that a hacker group called Rex Mundi had stolen customer information of over 600,000 Belgian and French customers, and Mundi demanded 40,000 euros for the information to be withheld. The information was never released, but it’s unknown if the company ever paid the ransom.

While most of the year’s cyber attacks were for information, some people used the anonymity of the internet to harm people physically. Throughout last year, the practice of calling a SWAT team on other people, or “swatting,” grew in popularity. The offender would call an anonymous tip to a police station claiming to be someone and saying that they had hostages or were committing some other serious crime, causing the unsuspecting person to be raided by a SWAT. team.

The most infamous of these happened in August, when Jordan Matthewson, a man from Denver, was raided while broadcasting live to an audience of around 3,000 people. Several videos taken went viral and made international news by the next morning.

In November and December, two hacker groups came forward that would likely prove to be the most notorious, the Guardians of Peace and Lizard Squad. The Guardians of Peace focused solely on Sony, with the sole attempt of exterminating the impending release of ‘The Interview’, a controversial movie based around assassinating North Korean Leader Kim Jong Un. It was later revealed that the Guardians of Peace possibly had ties to the North Korean government, but many people doubt this accusation.

Lizard Squad, however, attacked Sony and Microsoft’s gaming services, Playstation Network and Xbox Live respectively. The attacks started early December, with two or three small ones, causing servers to go down for a few hours. Throughout this time, a twitter account belonging to the group began tweeting about a mass attack on these companies Christmas Day. Sure enough, on Dec. 25, both mega servers were attacked by a Denial-of-service (DoS), caused by the group flooding the servers with traffic, to the point where the servers couldn’t handle the traffic. The downtime extended over the next few days and both services have been online since.

Because of all the attacks last year, companies are now putting a lot of effort and resources into improving their security and reducing their chances of being compromised again. Most, if not all hacking groups mentioned have since gone dark, so it’s unsure if when or if there will be more attacks to these companies.