According to TechCrunch, 2024 marked a record-breaking year for ransomware attacks leaving lasting impacts for millions worldwide. Of these perhaps the most disruptive for Washingtonians were the cyberattack on the Washington State Court systems, effectively halting filing, hearings, and restricted access to the Washington Court website which includes court rules, as well as access to the Judicial Information System (which is how courts review criminal histories), and access to Odyssey which holds all Snohomish County court documents.
Impacts to workload and operations ultimately varied by court throughout the state during the outage. Both Marysville and Edmonds municipal courts confirmed with the Lynnwood Times that their computer systems were impacted by a statewide outage but that court sessions continued to take place.
A spokesman for the city of Lynnwood confirmed that the Lynnwood Municipal Court was also impacted by the outage.
The court systems were down from Monday, November 4, until November 18 as a safety precaution to prevent sensitive data being leaked after “unauthorized activity” was detected.
Also, this year was a cyberattack at SeaTac Airport on August 24 which led to an internet and web system outage.
The three-week long outage disrupted airport operations including gate information displays, baggage handling, and flight check-ins. This further resulted in cancelled and delayed flights for passengers and airport employees having to handwrite tickets and personally direct passengers. Collecting baggage was also a challenge as airport staff had to manually sort thousands of checked bags at the terminal.
The hacker group behind the Sea-Tac cyberattack—known as Rhysida Ransomware and believed to be a Russian organization—threatened to release sensitive information of airport employees while demanding $6 million in untraceable bitcoin.
Some other major hits this year included hackers stealing over 100 million American’s healthcare data in the largest U.S. health data breach ever, a cyberattack on loan services compromising the data of 16 million customers, and a ransomware attack on Synnovis cancelling surgeries and leaking data on 300 million patient interactions prompting the NHS to call it a critical incident, according to crypto-mogul Mario Nawfal.
Author: Kienan Briscoe
