It’s no little-known fact that hackers are always out there for your data. It’s one of the biggest risks of existing in this internet age. A single click can turn your entire life upside-down. Well, according to a new report, a bunch of lives were turned upside-down this year. CloudSEK released its 2024 report, and it shows just how much data was stolen this year.
The amount of data stolen this year would shock you, but realistically, it shouldn’t. We’ve seen major data breaches all throughout the year. In fact, it feels like we’ve seen some sort of data breach every day. It’s getting harder for companies to keep their data safe from hackers, as they keep evolving their tactics. It’s unfortunate for people who trust their data to these major companies.
The CloudSEK 2024 report reveals that hackers stole a TON of data in 2024
Whenever hacks happen, threat actors don’t run away with small amounts of data. You won’t hear about a hacker stealing 100MB from a database. They usually snatch hundreds of gigabytes if not a few terabytes of data. This adds up over a year.
CloudSEK looked at 45 highly active threat actors who’ve been dipping into very big companies like Microsoft, Apple, Adobe, IBM, Oracle, Cisco, Google, Tenda, and Redhat. Throughout the year, these actors stole and traded a total of 534,844GB of data on the dark web. That’s a staggering amount of data, but it gets better. That’s just the data that was traded. According to the report, a jaw-dropping 994TB of data was stolen throughout the year.
To put that into perspective, 128GB is a common smartphone storage configuration. Well, hackers stole the equivalent of approximately 7,765 smartphones with that storage. In other words, that’s A LOT!
Who was hit the hardest?
The threat actors had their sights set on some key regions, it appears. Among the places affected, the U.S., India, and Israel suffered the most data breaches. It would seem that the hackers just took a liking to these places, but that might not be the reason.
Much of the time, people hack certain places for specific reasons and during different times of the year. Both the U.S. and India had major elections this year, and we’ve seen a surge in data breaches when the elections reached their climaxes.
As per the report, the data breaches reached their peak during October this year. This is when the elections were ramping up in the U.S. Even September was in 4th place in terms of number of hacks. 3rd place belongs to June and 2nd belongs to August.
This shows that cyber threats are constantly on the rise and that threat actors are getting more sophisticated. This is why proper cybersecurity is important and commonsense online safety practices are important.
2024-12-28 15:10:22