Technology
Biggest Data Breaches of 2024: 1 Billion Records Stolen and Growing
We’re already halfway through 2024, and already this yr we have seen some of the biggest, most damaging data breaches in recent memory. And just while you think some of these hacks couldn’t get any worse, they do occur.
From vast troves of customer personal data which were stolen, stolen and posted online, to tons of medical records regarding most individuals within the United States which were stolen, the worst data breaches of 2024 have already surpassed not less than 1 billion stolen records, and this number is growing. These breaches not only affect individuals whose data has been irretrievably exposed, but in addition embolden criminals who take advantage of their malicious cyberattacks.
Travel with us to the recent past to see how the largest security incidents of 2024 occurred, what their impact was, and in some cases, how they might have been prevented.
Mysterious AT&T data breach exposes 73 million customer accounts
About three years after a hacker released a printed sample of allegedly stolen AT&T customer data, the info breach broker in March put its entire cache of 73 million customer records online on a distinguished cybercrime forum for anyone to see. The data published included customers’ personal information, including names, telephone numbers and mailing addresses, and some customers confirmed that their details were accurate.
However, the telecom giant only took motion after a security researcher discovered that the leaked data included encrypted passwords used to access the client’s AT&T account. A security researcher told TechCrunch on the time that encrypted passwords may very well be easily decrypted, putting roughly 7.6 million existing AT&T customer accounts in danger of being compromised. AT&T forced password resets on its customer accounts after TechCrunch notified the corporate of the researcher’s findings.
One big mystery stays unsolved: AT&T still doesn’t understand how the info was leaked or where it got here from.
Change Healthcare hackers stole medical data from a “significant portion” of people in America
In 2022, the U.S. Department of Justice sued medical health insurance giant UnitedHealth Group to dam its attempted takeover of health tech giant Change Healthcare, fearing that the transaction would give the healthcare conglomerate broad access to about “half of all Americans’ health insurance claims” annually. The try to block the transaction ultimately failed. Then, two years later, something much worse happened: An influential ransomware gang hacked Change Healthcare; its massive banks of sensitive health data were stolen because one of the corporate’s key systems wasn’t protected with multi-factor authentication.
The cyberattack’s lengthy outages dragged on for weeks, causing widespread disruptions to hospitals, pharmacies and healthcare facilities across the United States. But the complete impact of the info breach has yet to be realized, although the implications for those affected are more likely to be irreversible. UnitedHealth says the stolen data — which it paid hackers to repeat — includes personal, medical and billing information for a “significant portion” of people within the United States.
UnitedHealth has not yet said how many individuals were affected by the breach. The health giant’s CEO, Andrew Witty, told lawmakers that the breach could affect a few third of Americans, and potentially more. For now, it says it only affects tons of of hundreds of thousands of people within the U.S.
The Synnovis ransomware attack caused widespread outages in hospitals across London
A June cyberattack on UK pathology laboratory Synnovis – a blood and tissue testing laboratory for hospitals and healthcare facilities across the UK – caused widespread disruption to patient services for weeks. Local National Health Service trusts that depend on the laboratory postponed 1000’s of surgeries and procedures after the breach, prompting the declaration of a critical incident within the UK health sector.
The cyberattack was blamed on a Russian-based ransomware gang that led to theft of data related to roughly 300 million patient interactions from a “significant number” of years ago. As with the Change Healthcare data breach, the implications for those affected are more likely to be significant and lasting.
Some of the info has already been published online to be able to force the laboratory to pay a ransom. Synnovis apparently refused to pay the hackers a ransom of $50 millionstopping the gang from cashing in on the break-in but leaving it UK government searching for plan in case hackers put hundreds of thousands of medical records online.
One of the NHS trusts that manages five hospitals in London affected by the outages reportedly failed to fulfill data security standards required by the NHS before the June cyberattack on Synnovis.
560 million records were allegedly stolen within the Snowflake Ticketmaster hack
A series of data thefts from cloud data giant Snowflake quickly was one of the largest breaches of the yr, with massive amounts of data stolen from corporate customers.
Cybercriminals have stolen tons of of hundreds of thousands of customer data from some of the world’s largest corporations, including alleged 560 million records from Ticketmaster, 79 million records from Advance Auto Parts and roughly 30 million records from TEG – using stolen credentials of data engineers with access to their employers’ Snowflake environments. Snowflake, for its part, doesn’t require (or force) its customers to make use of a security feature that protects against hacks that depend on stolen or reused passwords.
Incident response firm Mandiant said about 165 Snowflake customers had their accounts stolen, and in some cases, “a significant amount of customer data.” So far, only a handful of the 165 corporations have confirmed that their environments were breached, which also includes tens of 1000’s of worker data from Neiman Marcus AND Bank SantanderAND (*1*)hundreds of thousands of Los Angeles Unified School District student recordsYou can expect many Snowflake customers to come back forward.
Technology
Department of Justice: Google must sell Chrome to end its monopoly
The U.S. Department of Justice argued Wednesday that Google should sell its Chrome browser as part of a countermeasure to break the corporate’s illegal monopoly on online search, according to a filing with the Justice Department. United States District Court for the District of Columbia. If the answer proposed by the Department of Justice is approved, Google won’t have the option to re-enter the search marketplace for five years.
Ultimately, it’ll be District Court Judge Amit Mehta who will determine what the ultimate punishment for Google might be. This decision could fundamentally change one of the most important firms on the planet and alter the structure of the Internet as we understand it. This phase of the method is anticipated to begin sometime in 2025.
In August, Judge Mehta ruled that Google constituted an illegal monopoly since it abused its power within the search industry. The judge also questioned Google’s control over various web gateways and the corporate’s payments to third parties to maintain its status because the default search engine.
The Department of Justice’s latest filing says Google’s ownership of Android and Chrome, that are key distribution channels for its search business, poses a “significant challenge” to remediation to ensure a competitive search market.
The Justice Department has proposed other remedies to address the search engine giant’s monopoly, including Google spinning off its Android mobile operating system. The filing indicated that Google and other partners may oppose the spin-off and suggested stringent countermeasures, including ending the use of Android to the detriment of search engine competitors. The Department of Justice has suggested that if Google doesn’t impose restrictions on Android, it must be forced to sell it.
Prosecutors also argued that the corporate must be barred from stepping into exclusionary third-party agreements with browser or phone firms, resembling Google’s agreement with Apple to be the default search engine on all Apple products.
The Justice Department also argued that Google should license its search data, together with ad click data, to competitors.
Additionally, the Department of Justice also set conditions prohibiting Google from re-entering the browser market five years after the spin-off of Chrome. Additionally, it also proposed that after the sale of Chrome, Google mustn’t acquire or own any competing ad text search engine, query-based AI product, or ad technology. Moreover, the document identifies provisions that allow publishers to opt out of Google using their data to train artificial intelligence models.
If the court accepts these measures, Google will face a serious setback as a competitor to OpenAI, Microsoft and Anthropic in AI technology.
Google’s answer
In response, Google said the Department of Justice’s latest filing constitutes a “radical interventionist program” that may harm U.S. residents and the country’s technological prowess on the planet.
“The Department of Justice’s wildly overblown proposal goes far beyond the Court’s decision. “It would destroy the entire range of Google products – even beyond search – that people love and find useful in their everyday lives,” said Google’s president of global affairs and chief legal officer Kent Walker. blog post.
Walker made additional arguments that the proposal would threaten user security and privacy, degrade the standard of the Chrome and Android browsers, and harm services resembling Mozilla Firefox, which depends upon Google’s search engine.
He added that if the proposal is adopted, it could make it tougher for people to access Google search. Moreover, it could hurt the corporate’s prospects within the AI race.
“The Justice Department’s approach would lead to unprecedented government overreach that would harm American consumers, developers and small businesses and threaten America’s global economic and technological leadership at precisely the moment when it is needed most,” he said.
The company is to submit a response to the above request next month.
Wednesday’s filing confirms earlier reports that prosecutors were considering getting Google to spin off Chrome, which controls about 61% of the U.S. browser market. According to to the StatCounter web traffic service.
Technology
Snowflake acquires data management company Datavolo
Cloud giant Snowflake has agreed to take over Datavoloa company managing the data pipeline, for an undisclosed amount.
Snowflake announced the deal on Wednesday after the market bell closed, while reporting its third-quarter 2025 earnings. The purchase has not yet closed and is subject to customary closing conditions, Snowflake noted wa release.
Joseph Witt and Luke Roquet, who met while working together at Hortonworks, founded Datavolo in 2023. Witt was previously a vp at Cloudera, and Roquet was Cloudera’s chief marketing officer and, before that, director of business development at AWS.
Datavolo uses Apache NiFi, an open source data processing project developed by the NSA, to power a platform to automate data flow between disparate enterprise data sources. Data “processors” extract, cleanse, transform and enrich data, including for generative use of artificial intelligence.
With Datavolo having raised $21 million in enterprise capital from investors including Citi Ventures and General Catalyst prior to the acquisition, Snowflake CEO Sridhar Ramaswamy envisions creating more comprehensive data pipelines for Snowflake customers. For example, he says Datavolo can enable users to interchange single-use data connectors with flexible pipelines that allow them to maneuver data from cloud and on-premises sources to Snowflake’s data cloud.
“By bringing Datavolo to Snowflake, we are increasing the amount of data captured by Snowflake over the lifecycle, providing our customers with both simplicity and cost savings, without sacrificing data extensibility,” Ramaswamy said in a press release. “We are thrilled to have the Datavolo team join Snowflake as we accelerate the best platform for enterprise data – unstructured and structured, batch and streaming – and committed to the success of the open source community.”
Witt says Snowflake will support and help manage the Apache NiFi project after the acquisition closes. “Data engineering at scale can be extremely expensive and complex, and our goal has always been to simplify our customers’ experiences so they can realize value faster,” he added within the press release. “By joining forces with Snowflake, we can deliver the massive scale and radical simplicity of the Snowflake platform to our customers, ultimately unlocking data engineering for more users.”
Thanks partly to artificial intelligence, demand for data management technologies has increased. Fortune’s business insights estimates that the worldwide enterprise data management market could possibly be price $224.87 billion by 2032.
However, data management has been a challenge for enterprises long before the substitute intelligence boom. According to in a 2022 survey by Great Hopetions, a data quality platform, 91% of organizations said data quality issues impact their performance.
Against this backdrop, it isn’t surprising that firms like Datavolo are gaining prominence.
Today was a giant day for Snowflake who reported better-than-expected earnings sent the company’s shares up 19%. In addition to the acquisition of Snowflake, the company announced a multi-year partnership with Anthropic to integrate the startup’s AI models into Snowflake’s Cortex AI, Snowflake Intelligence and Cortex Analyst products.
Technology
Federal prosecutors have charged another Forbes 30 Under 30 alum with fraud
FBI yesterday he unveiled the indictment which accused Joanna Smith-Griffin, founding father of the bogus intelligence startup AllHere Education, of engaging in “securities fraud, wire fraud and aggravated identity theft in connection with defrauding investors” of nearly $10 million. The FBI alleges that from a minimum of November 2020 through June 2024, she misrepresented her company’s revenue, customer base and money to investors.
According to the U.S. Attorney’s Office, the corporate is in Chapter 7 bankruptcy. If convicted, Smith-Griffin faces prison sentences that include a maximum sentence of 20 years for securities fraud, a maximum sentence of 20 years for wire fraud, and a compulsory sentence two years for a professional identity thief. Smith-Griffin couldn’t be reached for comment.
The Forbes 30 Under 30 list has change into a meme over the past few years as several winners have been accused of fraud. The The Forbes-for-scam pipeline includes FTX founder Sam Bankman-Fried and Caroline Ellison, co-CEO of (*30*) Research; Fintech founder Frank, Charlie Javice, and “Pharma bro” Martin Shkreli.
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