In case anyone doubted that data breaches are in full-court press mode, research from Gemalto has revealed that a full 1, data breaches led to almost 1. Big events like the AdultFriendFinder breach contributed significantly to the spike. And further, more than 7 billion data records have been exposed since when the index began benchmarking publicly disclosed data breaches. That translates to over 3 million records compromised every day, or roughly 44 records every second.
This highlights the cyber-criminal trend from financial information attacks to bigger databases with large volumes of personally identifiable information, Gemalto said in its report. Clearly, fraudsters are also shifting from attacks targeted at financial organizations to infiltrating large data bases such as entertainment and social media sites.
Lastly, fraudsters have been using encryption to make breached data unreadable, then hold it for ransom and decrypting once they are paid. Speaking of encryption, last year 4. In some of these instances, the password was encrypted, but other information was left unencrypted. However, of the almost 1. The Breach Level Index also measures the severity of breaches based on multiple dimensions, including the number of records compromised, the type of data, the 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 Breach Level Index provides a comparative list of breaches, distinguishing data breaches that are a not serious versus those that are truly impactful scores run Last year, the account access-based attack on AdultFriendFinder exposing million records scored a 10 in terms of severity on the Breach Level Index.
Other notable breaches in included Fling BLI: 9. The top 10 breaches in terms of severity accounted for over half of all compromised records. While Yahoo! Across industries, the technology sector had the largest increase in data breaches in Google Blocked 2. Webinar 5 Dec You're Hired!
