The Top 5 Data Breaches of 2024

2024 delivered several data breaches large enough to make national news - and each one offers concrete lessons for Minneapolis-St. Paul businesses about where their own vulnerabilities might be hiding.

What Made 2024's Breaches Notable

Beyond sheer scale, several of the year's largest breaches shared common root causes: third-party vendor compromises, unpatched known vulnerabilities, and credential-based attacks that bypassed traditional perimeter defenses entirely.

Key Lessons From the Year's Biggest Incidents

• •Third-party risk is your risk: Several major breaches originated not from the primary organization's own systems, but from a vendor or service provider with access to their data.
• •Known vulnerabilities remain the biggest entry point: Many breaches exploited vulnerabilities that had patches available months before exploitation.
• •Detection speed determines damage: Breaches identified and contained quickly caused dramatically less harm than those that went undetected for extended periods.
• •Notification and response planning matters: Organizations with practiced incident response plans managed public and regulatory response far more smoothly than those improvising in real time.

Applying These Lessons to Your Business

1. Audit vendor and third-party access to your systems and data - and hold vendors to a security standard, not just a price point.
2. Maintain aggressive patch management, prioritizing known, actively exploited vulnerabilities.
3. Invest in detection capability, not just prevention - assume something will eventually get through, and plan to catch it fast.
4. Build and practice an incident response plan before you need it.

Veracity Technologies helps Minneapolis-St. Paul businesses apply real-world breach lessons to their own security posture through our Business Technology Assessment.