From January to August 2023, more than 360 million people were compromised by data breaches at corporations or institutions, according to a study conducted by MIT Professor Stuart Madnick and funded by Apple.
“We are at a record number of breaches and loss of data,” says Kirk Hasty, a Senior Technical Product Manager at Carbon Black. Just through September, 2023, data breaches were already 20% higher than in all of 2022.
With so much cybercrime in the news, it can be easy to lose track. In this article, we take a look month-by-month into some of the most significant attacks of the year to date.
A Key Event for Every Month
January: Royal Mail
It’s appropriate to open our profiles with an attack that was actually discovered the year prior, in November of 2022, when malware was first detected on the servers of the British postal service and courier company. In January of 2023, the LockBit Ransomware-as-a-Service caused printers at a Belfast distribution center to print their demands.
Mail service was disrupted for several days, and while the Royal Mail refused to pay the supposed $80 million ransom, the disruption and remediation may have cost the mail carrier $12.4 million.