Let’s end this week and the first month of 2025 with a quick recap of some of this week’s cybersecurity-related news headlines:
By now, you’ve probably heard lots of news coverage about the UnitedHealthcare attack that leaked customer information, disabled the company’s IT systems and affected treatment for multiple months. It turns out that this already massive breach is a lot larger than originally thought, with a new estimate of 190 million people being affected. This number is almost double of what the previous estimates stated.
(–Source: PCMag on MSN
Read More: UnitedHealthcare Now Estimates 190 Million Were Impacted by Cyberattack )
A Chinese competitor to popular AI tools, such as ChatGPT, released its open-source R1 model last week and has been generating quite a buzz in the AI space, landing it in top spots on app stores and industry leaderboards.
Though little information about the incident is known, DeepSeek announced that user registrations will have to be temporarily limited “due to large-scale malicious attacks.” Already existing users are currently still able to log in and use the service.
(–Source: NBC News on MSN
Read More: DeepSeek hit with large-scale cyberattack, says it’s limiting registrations )
To give you an idea of just how major some of the data breaches of 2024 were, let’s take a moment to compare 2023’s stats to 2024’s.
Even though 2023 had a record-breaking total number of data breaches that 2024 did not quite beat, 2024 greatly surpassed the prior year with the number of victims caught up in these incidents. The number of individuals affected in data breaches was up 312% in 2024, jumping from 419 million data breach notices sent out in 2023 to 1,728,519,397 in 2024.
(–Source: The HIPAA Journal
Read More: More Than 1.7 Billion Individuals Had Personal Data Compromised in 2024 )
Frederick Health hospitals in Maryland were forced to take several of their systems offline on Monday due to a ransomware attack. While the incident is currently being investigated with third-party cybersecurity experts, a majority of the hospitals stayed open on Tuesday and remain open to continue to provide care to patients, despite some of their internal calling systems remaining down.
(–Source: ABC 7 News
Read More: Ransomware attack disrupts Frederick Health operations, some systems taken offline )
One of the largest non-profit blood centers in the country, New York Blood Center (NYBC), was hit by a ransomware attack, leading the organization to take some of their systems offline in order to mitigate the attack. This incident is causing service disruptions, and NYBC is working to get their systems back online as quickly as possible. The full extent of this attack and whether patient data was compromised is currently unknown as the investigation is still ongoing.
(–Source: TechCrunch
Read More: US blood donation giant warns of disruption after ransomware attack | TechCrunch )