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Now and then, we hear about data breaches affecting anywhere between a few thousand to millions of people worldwide, but 2024 has proved to be one of the worst years in recent times when it comes to cybersecurity breaches.
These data breaches may not come off as something serious at first, but many of these breached datasets that are available on the dark web may contain your personal information like passwords, addresses, browsing habits and medical history.
All of this is either sold to the highest bidder or held as ransom in exchange for millions of dollars from large organisations. From US telecom giant AT&T to Indian cryptocurrency trading platform WazirX, here are some of the biggest data breaches of 2024.
Earlier this year in August, WazirX, one of the most popular cryptocurrency trading platforms in India experienced a cybersecurity breach, following which the platform paused trading and halted both rupee and crypto withdrawals.
Reportedly, hackers stole cryptocurrency worth $230 million from the platform, affecting nearly half of the platform’s reserves. While the cryptocurrency platform is yet to disclose the number of affected users, the company’s co-founder Nischal Shetty said that they plan to distribute the losses amongst users.
According to WazirX’s plan, users will be able to trade or withdraw only 55 per cent of their crypto assets. As for the other 45 per cent, users can choose to trade their remaining crypto assets without being able to withdraw the funds, or, they can trade and withdraw their remaining fund but won’t get priority treatment if the stolen assets are recovered.
Recently, WazirX announced that it is undoing all trades between July 18 and July 21 and that all portfolios will be restored to their status as of July 18, the day the data breach reportedly took place. This means all transactions between July 18 and July 21 will be disregarded, and any fees or referral earnings will be reversed as well.
AT&T, one of the biggest telecom operators in the United States was affected by not one but two data breaches, which took place months apart from one another. In July, the firm reported that cybercriminals had stolen records of a whopping 110 million people over a time period of six months back in 2022. While the information wasn’t directly stolen from AT&T systems, it contained sensitive information like phone numbers and call records.
The stolen data isn’t publicly available and does not contain the contents of calls or messages, but it can be used to determine approximate locations of people and call logs of the person you called and received calls from. Moreover, the record also reportedly features information of non AT&T customers who received a call from those on the network.
Earlier this year in March, on a known and publicly accessible cybercrime forum, hackers posted a data cache that contained 73 million customer records. These records not only included names and numbers, but also had postal addresses. In a statement to TechCrunch, AT&T also admitted that encrypted passcodes of around 7.6 million customers were also breached, which could be used to login to their telecom accounts. AT&T still says it has no idea how or where the data leaked from.
Earlier this month, India’s insurance giant Star Health and Allied Insurance was hit by a cyberattack, which the company says enabled “unauthorised and illegal access to certain data.” Based out of Chennai, Star Health offers health, overseas and travel insurance to more than 170 million Indians and has 14,000 hospitals and 850 offices across India.
It is still uncertain if and how threat actors were able to access the data, but a recent report by Reuters hints that hackers reportedly used Telegram chatbots to steal data belonging to 31 million Star Health policyholders. It goes on to say that the hackers made 5.8 million claims publicly accessible last month and shared samples of the personal data with potential buyers. The information included phone numbers, tax details, ID cards, test results, medical diagnoses of victims and addresses.
Following the data breach, Star Health moved the Madras High Court and filed a complaint against Telegram for hosting the chatbots and US-based software company Cloudflare, accusing the latter of hosting a website set up by the hackers where the stolen data was up for sale.
As part of multiple data leaks from the cloud data giant Snowflake, hackers may have stolen 560 million records from Ticketmaster, 79 million from Advance Auto Parts and 30 million from Australian ticket seller TEG. Cybercriminals reportedly used compromised credentials of engineers that gave them access to their company’s Snowflake environment.
While most software solutions that handle sensitive data often require multi-factor authentication, Snowflake is one of the few firms that do not enforce these security measures. According to Mandiant, the threat actors may have been able to steal information from over 165 companies, but many companies have yet to acknowledge that their databases have been breached.
UnitedHealth Group, a US-based health insurance giant, which acquired Change Healthcare back in 2022, reported a data breach where the latter was targeted by a ransomware gang. The cyberattack not only affected data records but also caused widespread outages at various hospitals and pharmacies across the United States.
According to UnitedHealth Group, who paid the hackers to obtain a copy of the data, the leaked information includes personal, medical and billing information of millions of people. While the exact figure is still unknown, the company’s chief executive Andrew Witty said that it might affect 33 per cent or one-third of Americans. However, the figure might increase significantly as the firm is yet to understand the full impact of the breach.
The data breaches reached alarming levels this year affecting millions of people and organisations around the world. Be it stolen cryptocurrency or sensitive healthcare information, the instances underscore a growing need for robust cybersecurity measures.
