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2024: The year of most damaging data breaches

2024 is the year of most damaging data breaches

TransUnion's report on H2 2024 fraud trends emphasizes the severity of data breaches in the US, which have reached historic levels in the first half of 2024.

Healthcare, financial services, and education are among the industries with the highest volume of breaches. Healthcare also had the most significant breach, with criminals targeting third-party service providers like payroll services, medical billing vendors as a source for multiple user credentials. Contrary to healthcare, financial services were mostly exposed to primary data breach which is a direct attack on the organization.

Top confidentiality data compromised in the US data breaches H1 2024 includes name, social security number (SIN), date of birth, home address, medical history,  driver's license, banking account numbers, phone numbers, healthcare provider & insurance account number. Substantial year-over-year increase has been observed in the breach of medical history data, healthcare provider and healthcare insurance account numbers.

The data breaches in 2024 has surpassed 1 billion stolen records and are rising. Below are some of the biggest security breaches of 2024,

  • AT&T: The telecom giant was affected by two separate data breaches where customer data like records of calls and texts were illegally downloaded by a third-party platform.
  • Change Healthcare: The health tech giant was attacked by a ransomware gang which compromised  personal, medical and billing information of over 100 million Americans.
  • Synnovis: The UK pathology lab, Synnovis was a victim of  ransomware attack that resulted in patient data being stolen. Around 400 GB of sensitive data was published online to extort the lab into paying a ransom.
  • Snowflake customers: A significant volume of data has been stolen from hundreds of snowflake cloud storage customers linking to massive data breaches at Ticketmaster, Neiman Marcus group, Santander bank, and many other impacted companies. This incident was triggered via compromised login credentials due to poor security practices.


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