In today’s increasingly digital world, cybercrime and online criminal activities pose significant threats to individuals, businesses, and governments alike. One of the most effective strategies in combating these threats is the comprehensive monitoring of criminal forums and platforms.

On Friday 19 July 2024, CrowdStrike suffered a serious outage in which over 8.5 million computers were taken offline. Whilst it may have first appeared to be a cyber-attack, it was actually a faulty update to CrowdStrike Falcon which led to computers crashing to a blue screen on boot. Many organisations were affected, and in some cases were unable to access computer systems for multiple hours.

As the threat landscape continues to develop, ransomware and data brokerage groups constantly emerge, develop, and disband. Cyjax observed a relatively high level of data-leak site (DLS) emergence in July 2024, with a total of nine new sites. For reference, the highest observed number of ransomware groups that have emerged in a single month is ten (September 2022).