Last Minute Breach News of 2024
End of year for cybersecurity means planning annual budgets, evaluation, and last minute fines against violators of regulations. While healthcare has been an especially hard hit sector, people’s online activity on social media platforms continues to carry great risk to personal information. Ireland’s privacy regulator, the Data Protection Commission (DPC), has been particularly active in recent years, and now they are once again levying penalties.
For alleged data security failures that led to Facebook’s 2018 breach, parent company Meta has been fined €251 million ($263 million). This comes on the heels of previous DPC penalties, one in September of €91 million ($96 million) for poor user password protection, and in 2023, a whopping €1.2 billion ($1.3 billion) for improper data transfer between the EU and US. Now, however, the organization is alleging that Facebook account data such as locations, posts, contact info, and even children’s personal data were exposed due to a failure in Meta’s video upload system.
Six years is quite a gap to be hit with a fine. The DPC gives its reasons as Meta’s numerous violations of Europe’s GDPR. Failures in making a thorough breach notification at the time of the incident, in documenting the facts of each breach and the remedial steps taken, and for failing to implement strong data protection methods in designing its processing systems: all coalesced into the latest fine for Meta. And these just equal a few of the penalties Meta has faced in recent years.
We’ve spent most of this and past years discussing data breaches and how the rise of factors like ransomware continue to evolve to harass users. Data vulnerabilities by this point affect everyone around the world, with data being such a critical part of individual lives, infrastructure and every industry. As mentioned, healthcare firms have faced a brunt of this cybercrime. One of the biggest breaches in 2024 was against Change Healthcare; with 100 million Americans affected (roughly one third of the population), it became the largest healthcare breach on record.
On the smaller end of the scale, earlier this month, Ascension Health disclosed a data breach of 5.6 million patients. Ransomware crooks disrupted operations for numerous hospitals, including electronic health records, lab and surgical systems. Ransomware continued to plague organizations in 2024, with an average of 19 attacks every second of every day. Firms must continue to take preventative measures such as educating employees and users, keeping all their systems and software updated, utilizing antivirus and firewalls, and encrypting their stored data.
Heading into the new year, there is clearly no shortage of bad actors looking to screw you over by giving you a major data headache. To help guard against this trend, NetLib Security is here to help prioritize data security in the coming year. Using our robust Encryptionizer solution, sensitive data can be encrypted across all environments: physical, virtual and cloud. Right out of the box, and with no additional programming required, it just works, smoothly and efficiently.
Sharing your data with any number of organizations who may lack sufficient or even standard protective measures means that you yourself have to keep track of your accounts. Make sure your identity is still your own.