AI adoption is booming—but so is cybercrime. Programs disguised as popular AI tools that contain malware are being planted by threat actors hoping to deceive companies jumping in and adopting AI. According to Cisco Talos, Cisco's "threat intelligence research organization", these programs may be downloaded by accident due to search result manipulation, in which tactics are used to make the illegitimate programs appear higher in the search results than others.

In an article titled Healthcare Data Breach Statistics, HIPAA Journal revealed that 2024 saw the single largest healthcare data breach on record, affecting 190 million individual records. This followed a record-breaking 2023, which saw 725 breaches containing over 133 million records exposed.

A 19-year-old from Massachusetts has pled guilty to being behind last year’s PowerSchool data breach, which affected 18,476 Massachusetts residents, with some students, families, and staff having their social security numbers and medical records exposed.

In April, Direct iT President and CEO David Javaheri flew out to a cybersecurity conference to present on the same stage as business luminaries Daymond John, Robert Herjavec, and Kevin O’Leary.

 

Javaheri believes that small businesses are being targeted by threat actors more frequently than ever before.