The 4 Worst Cyberattacks in 2024 so Far and How to Protect Your Business
It’s no secret that cybercrime is on the rise yearly, with an estimated 22% of businesses having experienced a cyber attack in 2024 alone. These attackers are after your assets and data so you must ensure you know everything possible about what you could be facing.
The best way to do this is by making sure that you know what has happened in the past — after all, attacks in the near past will be able to help inform you what is happening in the world of cybercrime and aware of everything that you need to know about cyberattacks in 2024.
In this article, we go over the four worst cyberattacks in 2024 (so far), to ensure that you know exactly what to do to protect your business from these attacks. We’ll also let you know how you can reach out to us for extra support, to ensure you have a helping hand in protecting yourself against the worst attacks.
The French State DDoS Attack: A Cross-Border Digital Crisis
In early 2024, French ministerial services were hit by heavy dedicated denial of service (DDoS) attacks — claimed to be committed by the Sudanese branch of the worldwide hacktivist collective Anonymous. A DDoS attack is an attack that sends lots of requests to a server to essentially overload it with requests, causing denial of service and downtime to the server that’s being attacked.
While DDoS attacks aren’t as invasive as other cyber attacks, heavy attacks such as this one can cause extensive damage to your organisation — the downtime caused by the attack can be a major inconvenience for your employees and customers alike and can cripple your organisation.
Using a service like Microsoft Azure DDoS protection will ensure that any DDoS attacks that target your organisation can’t work, due to different forms of DDoS mitigation that have become essential over the past decade.
The NHS Scotland Ransomware Attack: Public Health in the Crosshairs
March 2024 brought a cyberattack on The National Health Service (NHS) in Dumfries and Galloway, causing a small number of patient files to become entangled in a ransomware attack. The attack was committed by the group Inc. Ransom and was an attack of around three terabytes of data, according to their darknet blog.
This goes to show that the public sector is a major target for these kinds of attacks. Ensuring that you’re protected as a public health organisation is vital, as you become an easy target for crippling public infrastructure.
The best way to counter a cyberattack using ransomware is by using software such as Microsoft Defender for Endpoint to proactively stamp out these threats and ensure that they don’t become anything worse for your business to deal with.
The HSE Cyberattack Aftermath: The Ongoing Impact of Ireland’s Healthcare Service
Ireland’s Health Service Executive (HSE) has had over 470 legal proceedings issued against it in relation to a cyber attack that crippled the service’s IT systems and leaked the data of thousands of patients and staff.
This attack was perpetrated by Conti, a Russian cybercrime group, and was the biggest-ever attack on a healthcare service worldwide. However, the litigation is due to the fact that the HSE’s security posture was brittle — there was a ‘known low level of cybersecurity maturity’ according to the report conducted by the PwC on the attack.
With over 90,000 people affected by the incident whose data is now possibly anywhere on the dark web, there is surefire reason for individuals to be worried about the aftermath of the breach. With this, it goes to show how failing to prepare for a cyber incident can leave your organisation far worse off.
The whole HSE cyber attack and its aftermath should be a cautionary tale to any organisation failing to make sure it has a solid cybersecurity posture, as well as showing the dangers of flaunting compliance regulations and other cybersecurity standards that keep customers and their data safe from attackers.
26 Billion Record Data Breach: The Mother of All Breaches
In early 2024, a Mother of all Breaches (MOAB) occurred — 26 billion records leaked from LinkedIn, Twitter, Weibo, Tencent, and other platforms. This is the largest data breach ever discovered and was the product of a firewall misconfiguration. While it’s unclear who has the MOAB of 26 billion records, the perpetrator has a vested interest in large amounts of data.
This could make them a data broker, a hacker, or even a service that is using the data for its own benefit. It’s impossible to say, as this kind of data can be used in a multitude of different manners. From fraud and targeted attacks to phishing and even account access, it’s easy for anyone with this data to wreak havoc for tons of people worldwide.
This is especially dangerous as the leak did contain passwords, which means that anyone who uses passwords between accounts is in danger — after all, if your password is in the leak, it is now accessible and can be used on other platforms with the same password.
This is why it’s vital to make sure that you don’t use the same password on multiple accounts and to generate a new password for each account you create.
How We Can Help
Cyberattacks are a real modern threat, and making sure that you’re aware of the threats that any modern company can come up against is vital. By knowing about these attacks, you’ll be able to ensure that you can take decisive action and stop yourself from ending up in the same situation — or worse.
Looking to get started strengthening your organisation’s security but don’t know how? Our experts are here to help you get started with the wide away of security tools available to you, as well as providing around-the-clock support.
Get in touch with us now and see how we can help.