Data Breaches Compromised 4.5 Billion Records In First Half of 2018

Data breaches are an ever present danger, and their frequency and magnitude are only getting worse. According to digital security company Gemalto's 2018 Breach Level Index report, more than 4.5 billion data records were compromised in the first half of this year, a 133-percent increase from last year's report.

That's more than 25 million data records lost or stolen per day, over a million every hour, more than 17,000 every minute, and 291 records every second.

Gemalto tallied a total of 945 breach incidents worldwide in the first half of 2018, which is, surprisingly, less than the 1,162 breaches disclosed in the first half of 2017. A majority (559) of the incidents occurred in North America; 339 occurred in the Asia Pacific region, predominately Australia.

As high as these figures are, the total number of data records compromised is much higher. Of those 945 incidents, Gemalto said that for 20 percent of breaches, the number of compromised records was unknown.

Not surprising is that the top source of data breaches was "malicious outside actors," meaning external attackers. Those attacks encompassed more than 3.6 billon data records, or 80 percent of the total from the first half of 2018.

The next most prevalent cause of compromised data records was accidental data loss, which dropped by 47 percent from over 1.6 billion records in the 2017 report to 879 million in 2018. Those human mistakes still accounted for 318 out of the 945 total incidents this year. Beyond those two primary causes, 7 percent of breaches were the result of malicious insiders stealing information from a company, and 2 percent of breaches were perpetrated by hacktivists.

Across industries, healthcare got hit the worst, with 27 percent of breaches,. Attacks were otherwise distributed across financial and educational institutions, government and professional organizations, retail, industrial, and more. The breaches, however, had one overwhelming theme: identity theft accounted for 65 percent of breaches and over 3.9 billion of the compromised data records. Account access and financial access trailed far behind, making up 17 and 13 percent of breaches, respectively.

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The one silver lining in the report is that encryption remains the best security deterrent. Only 2.2 percent of data breaches occurred on systems where encrpytion was used.

Check out Gemalto's full infographic below:

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