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
The company is currently developing washing machines for humans
Forget about cold baths. Washing machines for people may soon be a brand new solution.
According to at least one Japanese the oldest newspapersOsaka-based shower head maker Science has developed a cockpit-shaped device that fills with water when a bather sits on a seat in the center and measures an individual’s heart rate and other biological data using sensors to make sure the temperature is good. “It also projects images onto the inside of the transparent cover to make the person feel refreshed,” the power says.
The device, dubbed “Mirai Ningen Sentakuki” (the human washing machine of the longer term), may never go on sale. Indeed, for now the company’s plans are limited to the Osaka trade fair in April, where as much as eight people will have the option to experience a 15-minute “wash and dry” every day after first booking.
Apparently a version for home use is within the works.
Technology
Zepto raises another $350 million amid retail upheaval in India
Zepto has secured $350 million in latest financing, its third round of financing in six months, because the Indian high-speed trading startup strengthens its position against competitors ahead of a planned public offering next yr.
Indian family offices, high-net-worth individuals and asset manager Motilal Oswal invested in the round, maintaining Zepto’s $5 billion valuation. Motilal co-founder Raamdeo Agrawal, family offices Mankind Pharma, RP-Sanjiv Goenka, Cello, Haldiram’s, Sekhsaria and Kalyan, in addition to stars Amitabh Bachchan and Sachin Tendulkar are amongst those backing the brand new enterprise, which is India’s largest fully national primary round.
The funding push comes as Zepto rushes so as to add Indian investors to its capitalization table, with foreign ownership now exceeding two-thirds. TechCrunch first reported on the brand new round’s deliberations last month. The Mumbai-based startup has raised over $1.35 billion since June.
Fast commerce sales – delivering groceries and other items to customers’ doors in 10 minutes – will exceed $6 billion this yr in India. Morgan Stanley predicts that this market shall be value $42 billion by 2030, accounting for 18.4% of total e-commerce and a pair of.5% of retail sales. These strong growth prospects have forced established players including Flipkart, Myntra and Nykaa to cut back delivery times as they lose touch with specialized delivery apps.
While high-speed commerce has not taken off in many of the world, the model seems to work particularly well in India, where unorganized retail stores are ever-present.
High-speed trading platforms are creating “parallel trading for consumers seeking convenience” in India, Morgan Stanley wrote in a note this month.
Zepto and its rivals – Zomato-owned Blinkit, Swiggy-owned Instamart and Tata-owned BigBasket – currently operate on lower margins than traditional retail, and Morgan Stanley expects market leaders to realize contribution margins of 7-8% and adjusted EBITDA margins to greater than 5% by 2030. (Zepto currently spends about 35 million dollars monthly).
An investor presentation reviewed by TechCrunch shows that Zepto, which handles greater than 7 million total orders every day in greater than 17 cities, is heading in the right direction to realize annual sales of $2 billion. It anticipates 150% growth over the following 12 months, CEO Aadit Palicha told investors in August. The startup plans to go public in India next yr.
However, the rapid growth of high-speed trading has had a devastating impact on the mom-and-pop stores that dot hundreds of Indian cities, towns and villages.
According to the All India Federation of Consumer Products Distributors, about 200,000 local stores closed last yr, with 90,000 in major cities where high-speed trading is more prevalent.
The federation has warned that without regulatory intervention, more local shops shall be vulnerable to closure as fast trading platforms prioritize growth over sustainable practices.
Zepto said it has created job opportunities for tons of of hundreds of gig employees. “From day one, our vision has been to play a small role in nation building, create millions of jobs and offer better services to Indian consumers,” Palicha said in an announcement.
Regulatory challenges arise. Unless an e-commerce company is a majority shareholder of an Indian company or person, current regulations prevent it from operating on a listing model. Fast trading corporations don’t currently follow these rules.
Technology
Wiz acquires Dazz for $450 million to expand cybersecurity platform
Wizardone of the talked about names within the cybersecurity world, is making a major acquisition to expand its reach of cloud security products, especially amongst developers. This is buying Dazzlespecialist in solving security problems and risk management. Sources say the deal is valued at $450 million, which incorporates money and stock.
This is a leap within the startup’s latest round of funding. In July, we reported that Dazz had raised $50 million at a post-money valuation of just below $400 million.
Remediation and posture management – two areas of focus for Dazz – are key services within the cybersecurity market that Wiz hasn’t sorted in addition to it wanted.
“Dazz is a leader in this market, with the best talent and the best customers, which fits perfectly into the company culture,” Assaf Rappaport, CEO of Wiz, said in an interview.
Remediation, which refers to helping you understand and resolve vulnerabilities, shapes how an enterprise actually handles the various vulnerability alerts it could receive from the network. Posture management is a more preventive product: it allows a company to higher understand the scale, shape and performance of its network from a perspective, allowing it to construct higher security services around it.
Dazz will proceed to operate as a separate entity while it’s integrated into the larger Wiz stack. Wiz has made a reputation for itself as a “one-stop shop,” and Rappaport said the integrated offering will proceed to be a core a part of it.
He believes this contrasts with what number of other SaaS corporations are built. In the safety industry, there are, Rappaport said, “a lot of Frankenstein mashups where companies prioritize revenue over building a single technology stack that actually works as a platform.” It could be assumed that integration is much more necessary in cybersecurity than in other areas of enterprise IT.
Wiz and Dazz already had an in depth relationship before this deal. Merat Bahat — the CEO who co-founded Dazz with Tomer Schwartz and Yuval Ofir (CTO and VP of R&D, respectively) — worked closely with Assaf Rappaport at Microsoft, which acquired his previous startup Adallom.
After Rappaport left to found Wiz together with his former Adallom co-founders, CTO Ami Luttwak, VP of Product Yinon Costica and VP of R&D Roy Reznik, Bahat was one in all the primary investors. Similarly, when Bahat founded Dazz, Assaf was a small investor in it.
The connection goes deeper than work colleagues. Bahat and Rappaport are also close friends, and she or he was the second family of Mickey, Rappaport’s beloved dog, referred to as Chief Dog Officer Wiz (together with LinkedIn profile). Once the deal was done, the 2 faced two very sad events: each Bahat and Mika’s mother died.
“We hope for a new chapter of positivity,” Bahat said. The cycle of life does indeed proceed.
Rumors of this takeover began to appear earlier this month; Rappaport confirmed that they then began talking seriously.
But that is not the one M&A conversation Wiz has gotten involved in. Earlier this 12 months, Google tried to buy Wiz itself for $23 billion to construct a major cybersecurity business. Wiz walked away from the deal, which might have been the biggest in Google’s history, partly because Rappaport believed Wiz could turn into a fair larger company by itself terms. And that is what this agreement goals to do.
This acquisition is a test for Wiz, which earlier this 12 months filled its coffers with $1 billion solely for M&A purposes (it has raised almost $2 billion in total, and we hear the subsequent round will close in just a few weeks). . Other offers included purchasing Gem security for $350 million, but Dazz is its largest acquisition ever.
More mergers and acquisitions could also be coming. “We believe next year will be an acquisition year for us,” Rappaport said.
In an interview with TC, Luttwak said that one in all Wiz’s priorities now’s to create more tools for developers that have in mind what they need to do their jobs.
Enterprises have made significant investments in cloud services to speed up operations and make their IT more agile, but this shift has include a significantly modified security profile for these organizations: network and data architectures are more complex and attack surfaces are larger, creating opportunities for malicious hackers to find ways to to hack into these systems. Artificial intelligence makes all of this far more difficult when it comes to malicious attackers. (It’s also a chance: the brand new generation of tools for our defense relies on artificial intelligence.)
Wiz’s unique selling point is its all-in-one approach. Drawing data from AWS, Azure, Google Cloud and other cloud environments, Wiz scans applications, data and network processes for security risk aspects and provides its users with a series of detailed views to understand where these threats occur, offering over a dozen products covering the areas, corresponding to code security, container environment security, and provide chain security, in addition to quite a few partner integrations for those working with other vendors (or to enable features that Wiz doesn’t offer directly).
Indeed, Wiz offered some extent of repair to help prioritize and fix problems, but as Luttwak said, the Dazz product is solely higher.
“We now have a platform that actually provides a 360-degree view of risk across infrastructure and applications,” he said. “Dazz is a leader in attack surface management, the ability to collect vulnerability signals from the application layer across the entire stack and build the most incredible context that allows you to trace the situation back to engineers to help with remediation.”
For Dazz’s part, once I interviewed Bahat in July 2024, when Dazz raised $50 million at a $350 million valuation, she extolled the virtues of constructing strong solutions and this week said the third quarter was “amazing.”
“But market dynamics are what trigger these types of transactions,” she said. She confirmed that Dazz had also received takeover offers from other corporations. “If you think about the customers and joint customers that we have with Wiz, it makes sense for them to have it on one platform.”
And a few of Dazz’s competitors are still going it alone: Cyera, like Dazz, an authority in attack surface management, just yesterday announced a rise of $300 million at a valuation of $5 billion (which confirms our information). But what’s going to he do with this money? Make acquisitions, after all.
Wiz says it currently has annual recurring revenue of $500 million (it has a goal of $1 billion ARR next 12 months) and has greater than 45% of its Fortune 100 customers. Dazz said ARR is within the tens of hundreds of thousands of dollars and currently growing 500% on a customer base of roughly 100 organizations.
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