Wrapping Up 2024: The Year’s Biggest Cyber Security Breaches and What We Learned

As the year draws to a close, it’s the perfect time to look back on the current cyber security landscape. The past year brought us a number of headline-grabbing cyber incidents, from data breaches to service outages. These incidents highlight how cyber threats are continuing to affect businesses of all sizes, in every sector. In this blog, we’ll reflect on some of the biggest cyber security stories of 2024, look at what went wrong, and explore how to strengthen your defences in 2025.

CrowdStrike Outage

This dramatic incident in July was one of the biggest cyber security stories of 2024, sending shockwaves around the world. CrowdStrike, a leading endpoint protection provider, experienced a major service outage in the early hours of the 19th July. The issue was caused by an unanticipated flaw in the deployment of a system update. This caused widespread disruption for the customers relying on CrowdStrike’s cloud-based threat intelligence and monitoring capabilities. It’s estimated that 8.5 million Windows devices were affected by the incident, causing havoc in airports, hospitals, supermarkets, and more.

The root cause of the incident was insufficient testing of the system update under real-world conditions. This, coupled with a lack of redundancies in critical areas, allowed the failure to disrupt businesses around the world. To prevent incidents like this happening in your own organisation, we advise organisations to rigorously stress-test updates – including in live environments – to ensure smooth implementation of the updates. It’s important to build resilient networks with fail-safe mechanisms and robust backup systems. This helps maintain the continuity of your operations whenever you uninstall an update.

Snowflake Data Breach

Snowflake, the cloud-based data storage company, faced an unprecedented data breach that hit the headlines earlier this year. A misconfigured access control in one of their cloud storage systems allowed unauthorised parties to access their systems. The team didn’t catch this oversight in time, allowing the attackers to steal sensitive client data, including financial records and proprietary information. Some of the businesses affected included Santander, Neiman Marcus Group, and Ticketmaster. Around 560 million Ticketmaster customers had their data stolen.

This breach shows the importance of understanding the cloud security shared responsibility model. Although cloud providers will secure their infrastructure, users are in turn responsible for securing their own data and configurations. To prevent similar incidents, we recommend businesses employ automated tools to continuously monitor their networks for misconfigurations and anomalies within cloud environments. This way, you can ensure the quick detection and mitigation of any potential vulnerabilities.

Blue Yonder Ransomware

Blue Yonder, one of the world’s leading supply chain software providers, was hit by a ransomware attack in November. The incident caused widespread disruption to its operations and impacted major retailers in the US and the UK. The attack, which targeted Blue Yonder’s managed services hosted environment, severely disrupted the supply chains of companies including Morrisons, Sainsbury’s, and Starbucks. The attack highlighted the vulnerabilities of the supply chain sector – although some companies like Tesco and DHL weren’t impacted, others such as Morrisons had to rely on backup systems to maintain operations.

For businesses, this attack underscores the importance of developing strong cyber resilience strategies. Organisations must ensure that their supply chain partners have robust cyber security measures in place. Any vulnerability can have knock-on effects, leading to significant disruptions up and down the supply chain. Businesses should also prioritise implementing backup systems that can be activated in case of a cyber incident – the regular testing and updating of these systems is essential in order to minimise downtime.

Lessons for 2025 – and Beyond

Reflecting on the cyber security stories of 2024, they offer a number of lessons for businesses looking to boost their security. One key takeaway is the importance of proactive threat hunting. Rather than waiting for an attack to happen, companies should conduct regular penetration testing and threat-hunting exercises to identify vulnerabilities before cybercriminals exploit them. Something else to consider is adopting a zero trust architecture, where every entity, whether internal or external, is assumed to be potentially compromised. This approach limits the damage that can occur in the event of a breach. 

Using AI and automated tools can also play a key role in enhancing your cyber security. These tools can analyse threats in real time and respond autonomously. They can also reduce the time it takes to detect a threat and stop it in its tracks. By adopting these strategies, businesses can build a more resilient cyber security posture and prepare themselves for the challenges ahead.

As the past 12 months show, no sector or business is immune to cyber attacks. From the disruption caused by CrowdStrike to cloud security breaches and ransomware attacks, these incidents show there are vulnerabilities to watch out for.

With 2025 fast approaching, the lessons learned from these incidents should serve as a guiding light for any business. We advise adopting a proactive and resilient approach to your cyber security strategy. This way, you can stay one step ahead of criminals, protecting your business – and your reputation – in the years to come.

Whatever solution you’re looking for, we can help. The experts at Infosec K2K can offer you specialist guidance, and help you find the product that’s the best fit for you.

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