The Victims tag covers people and organizations harmed by cyberattacks, including breaches, scams, malware, identity theft, and data exposure.
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Background for this topic.
Victims are people, organizations, or public bodies that suffer harm from cyber-enabled activity, such as account compromise, fraud, unauthorized data access, malware, or service disruption. The term may describe both the directly compromised party and individuals whose information, devices, or accounts are affected through an incident involving another organization.
For security practitioners, victim impact guides triage and response: identify affected systems and data, contain access, preserve evidence, and restore trustworthy operations. Exposed personal or confidential information can create privacy and notification obligations, while compromised credentials or devices may enable further attacks against the victim or its contacts. Recording victim details in threat intelligence—such as the targeted sector, initial access method, and affected assets—can help identify campaigns and improve controls. Clear communication and support also matter, because victims need accurate guidance on credential resets, account monitoring, fraud reporting, and available remediation.
Though the number of victims has risen, the actual number of breaches has gone down, as fewer, bigger breaches affect more individuals.
New figures reveal a massive 1170% increase in people impacted by data breaches in Q2 2024 versus a year ago
The ransomware is rudimentary with basic functionalities, likely having been created by an inexperienced developer — but it's effective at locking up files and sucking up memory capacity.
The Iranian APT group has shifted away from using legitimate remote monitoring tools to compromise its victims
The breach affects older customer information involved in purchases made from June 6, 2017, up until July 30, 2018.
Imagine you could gain access to any Fortune 100 company for $10 or less, or even for free. Terrifying thought, isn’t it? Or exciting, depending on which side of the cybersecurity barricade you are on. Well, that’s basically the state of things today. Welcome to the infostealer garden of low-hanging fruit
A threat actor that was previously observed using an open-source network mapping tool has greatly expanded their operations to infect over 1,500 victims