Malicious outsider data breaches skyrocket in 2016: Gemalto

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Attendees stand in the Gemalto NV pavilion at the Mobile World Congress in Barcelona, Spain, on Tuesday, March 3, 2015. The event, which generates several hundred million euros in revenue for the city of Barcelona each year, also means the world for a week turns its attention back to Europe for the latest in technology, despite a lagging ecosystem. Photographer: Simon Dawson/Bloomberg

Cyber attackers launched 1,792 data breaches in 2016, which led to almost 1.4 billion data records being compromised worldwide, according to the newly released Breach Level Index (BLI) report from security provider Gemalto.

Identity theft was the leading type of data breach last year, accounting for 59 percent of all data breaches, the report said. More than half of the data breaches (52%) in 2016 did not disclose the number of compromised records at the time they were reported.

The BLI is a global database that tracks data breaches and measures their severity based on multiple factors such as the number of records compromised, type of data, source of the breach, how the data was used, and whether or not the data was encrypted.

By assigning a severity score to each breach, the BLI provides a comparative list of breaches, distinguishing data breaches that are not serious from those that are truly impactful, Gemalto said. According to the BLI, more than 7 billion data records have been exposed since 2013, when the index began benchmarking publicly disclosed data breaches. That amounts to more than 3 million records compromised every day, or about 44 records every second.

In 2016, the top 10 breaches in terms of severity accounted for more than half of all compromised records. Identity theft was the cause of 59% of all data breaches, up five percent from 2015. The second most prevalent type of breach in 2016 was account access based breaches. While the incidence of this type of data breach decreased by three percent, it made up 54% of all breached records. That’s an increase of 336% from the previous year.

This highlights the cybercriminal trend from financial information attacks to bigger databases with large volumes of personally identifiable information, the report said.

Malicious outsiders were the leading source of data breaches, accounting for 68% of the attacks, up from 13% in 2015. The number of records breached in malicious outsider attacks increased by 286% from 2015.

This article originally appeared in Information Management.
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Cyber security Cyber attacks Identity theft Data security
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