Third-party incidents, critical infrastructure threats and regulatory fines for cyber attacks have all risen in 2024. Here’s how to avoid them in 2025.
With over one billion records exposed and over $1 billion in regulatory fines issued, 2024 was a record-breaking year for data breaches - in more ways than one.
From Fortune 500 companies and governmental bodies to healthcare institutions and critical infrastructure, organizations across the US, Europe and Asia have suffered wide-ranging cyberattacks, with cybercriminals employing a range of methods to steal sensitive data and stall business operations.
In particular, three key themes have emerged:
Third-party collaboration increases the risk of attack - no matter the size of the partner
To better protect your operations, reputation and bottom line in 2025, here’s three key lessons from 2024’s largest data breaches.
In 2024, 560 million customer records were stolen from Ticketmaster in the year’s most wide-reaching data breach. Cybercriminals stole sensitive data from around 100 million AT&T customers, including personal information and call logs. The eurozone’s second largest bank, Spain-based Santander, leaked personal and payroll information from over 10,000 global employees and 30 million customers. The common denominator? All three organizations were exposed through the same-third party partner: Snowflake.
Be it compromised software or stolen credentials, cybercriminals usually target smaller third-party and fourth-party contractors as a gateway to infiltrate larger companies further up the digital supply chain. But Snowflake is not a small custom parts supplier: it’s one of the world’s largest data companies, employing 7,000 people and generating almost $3 billion in revenue.
Given the Snowflake data breach affected 165 companies (with attackers able to use stolen credentials to inflict damage across the globe), it shows that no matter your level of internal cybersecurity and no matter the size of your external partner, any third-party collaboration can put you at risk.
The solution? Embed Zero Trust security in all your sensitive files by default. With no way to monitor your whole digital supply chain, you’re putting your organization at risk every time you share data externally. However, by automatically adding Zero Trust protection at the integration layer, all files shared externally are safe from unauthorized access no matter if they are leaked or stolen.
Healthcare companies and institutions around the world faced an unprecedented barrage of cyberattacks in 2024. In the US, the Change Healthcare breach affected 100 million people in the largest ever healthcare cyberattack in North America. The UK’s National Health Service (NHS) suffered three major cyberattacks, leading to thousands of cancelled operations. The cyber incident at Australian prescriptions company Medisure exposed the personal and health information of 13 million patients.
But healthcare was not the only critical infrastructure sector under attack. Over the course of 2023-2024, US utilities endured a 70% year-on-year increase in cyberattacks, attacks on US critical national infrastructure rose 30% and global critical infrastructure suffered the equivalent of 13 attacks per second.
Many of these attacks can trace their roots to state actors as part of growing geo-tensions. For instance, the UK’s Head of National Cyber Security Centre cited a trebling of ‘severe’ incidents linked to Russia and the US Cybersecurity and Infrastructure Security Agency (CISA) director, Jen Easterly, highlighted the growing threat from China, citing “intrusions into critical infrastructure across multiple sectors.”
The solution? Implement Zero Trust access controls and practices across all sensitive files. In October’s cybersecurity awareness month, CISA highlighted the need to build greater resilience in critical infrastructure amid state actors increasingly targeting critical infrastructure - even when there seems little value in it. As such, all companies that work in critical infrastructure should implement Zero Trust practices, such as applying least-privilege user rights as standard, to minimize the risk of breaches.
In 2024, the average cost of a data breach almost reached $5 million. In healthcare, this rises to over $10 million, while supply chain attacks to industries like aerospace and defense cost $82 million. But the financial cost of a cyber incident has now increased due to the risk of accompanying regulatory fines.
In the EU, for example, GDPR fines totalling over two billion euros were levied in 2024, including fines for failing to fulfil obligations around data breaches. For instance, the Greece-based Hellenic Post was fined €3 million for GDPR violations following a data breach and Italy-based UniCredit was issued a €2.8 million euro fine for a 2018 cyberattack on its mobile banking system.
Meanwhile, in the US, Lehigh Valley Health Network was forced to pay $65 million to victims of a cyberattack by regulators, genetic company 23andMe agreed to pay $30 million for failing to protect the privacy of its customers’ data, and AT&T reached a $13 million settlement with the FCC to resolve a vendor cloud breach.
The solution? Protect and track sensitive files from creation. The growing size and number of regulatory fines is part of an ongoing trend with an estimated $7.3 billion of data privacy fines handed out by governments since 2020. Regulators are clearly making a move on data privacy, so you need to implement security measures that not only protect your data at rest and in transit, but track where your sensitive data travels and who has access to it, so you can prove data privacy to regulators - even if you suffer a breach.
According to Forbes, Zero Trust security is one of the top cybersecurity trends for 2025 with perimeter-security now obsolete in the world of digital supply chains and remote work.
Whether you’re a critical infrastructure company using CAD files for engineering designs or a global enterprise using SAP to hold your financial information, check out our guides for implementing Zero Trust in 2025.
