Data Breaches Down, Data Losses Way Up in BLI Update

Gemalto has released the latest findings from its Breach Level Index, illustrating new trends that emerged with the conclusion of 2017.

The good news is that the number of data breach incidents went down by 11 percent compared to 2016. The bad news is that more data was compromised: Gemalto says last year saw the theft of 2.6 billion records, an increase of 88 percent compared to 2016.

Of the 1,765 data breaches disclosed last year, 69 percent involved identity theft. The sectors most affected were healthcare (taking 27 percent of the total), financial services (12 percent), education (11 percent), and government (11 percent). As for the culprits, in 72 percent of all data breach incidents, malicious outsiders were responsible.

Remarkably, incompetence has emerged as a serious threat to data security, with Gemalto asserting in its new BLI report that 1.9 billion of the records exposed last year were the result of accidents including “improper disposal of records, misconfigured databases and other unintended security issues”. With unintentional internal actors posing such a serious threat, the many organizations adopting biometric authentication for external users may want to turn those same solutions toward their staff as well.

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April 11, 2018 – by Alex Perala