The biggest data breaches of 2024 in financial services

The number of records leaked in data breaches this year was greater than the number of people living in the U.S. In fact, one breach — from data broker National Public Data — was singly responsible for 2.7 billion of these leaked records.

The sheer volume of data breached serves as a reminder that many — perhaps most — Americans have had their Social Security number, address, driver’s license number or some other piece of identifying information posted in a data breach dump online. This presents difficulty for banks and other companies seeking to verify the identity of customers.

However, these 2024 data breaches also disrupted the financial lives of many Americans. Besides dealing with identity theft, some consumers also temporarily lost access to their financial accounts this year because of ransomware. Banks and insurance companies also suffered reputational harm and customer attrition because of these cyberattacks.

What follows is a list of the largest data breaches and cyberattacks that affected the financial services industry this year. The list pertains to data breaches that have been publicly disclosed as of this writing. It does not include breaches that occurred in 2023 but were disclosed in 2024, of which there were two: one that affected 500,000 Texas Dow Employees Credit Union members and 57,000 Bank of America accountholders.