Channel Futures' Top 10 Cybersecurity Stories of 2024: Sophos, AT&T, CrowdStrike

2024 was another big year for cybersecurity news. Among the top cybersecurity stories were what’s been called the world’s biggest IT outage, game-changing acquisitions and a ransomware attack that disrupted auto sales nationally.

Cybercriminals were more brazen than ever, with increasing attacks on health care and data breaches impacting millions of consumers. In addition, the global average cost of a data breach reached $4.88 million, up 10% from the prior year, according to IBM. That was the largest yearly jump since the pandemic, as 70% of breached organizations reported that the breach caused significant or very significant disruption.

In addition, M&A shook up the competitive landscape in cybersecurity as vendors consolidated to beef up their capabilities and increase market share.

And AI and cybersecurity continued to take center stage, including using good AI to fight the bad guys using AI, and the terrifying unknown of AI’s future capabilities. In addition, vendors' latest solutions all focused on AI to stop attacks. 

We have assembled our list of this year's top cybersecurity stories in the slideshow above. While many of the articles in our countdown are among those that brought the most traffic to our website in 2024, we recognize others for the overall impact they have had on the channel.

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