by Angela Guess

According to a recent press release, “Gemalto, the world leader in digital security, today released the latest findings of the Breach Level Index, revealing that 2.6 billion records were stolen, lost or exposed worldwide in 2017, an 88% increase from 2016. While data breach incidents decreased by 11%, 2017 was the first year publicly disclosed breaches surpassed more than two billion compromised data records since the Breach Level Index began tracking data breaches in 2013.”

The release goes on, “Over the past five years, nearly 10 billion records have been lost, stolen or exposed, with an average of five million records compromised every day. Of the 1,765 data breach incidents in 2017, identity theft represented the leading type of data breach, accounting for 69% of all data breaches. Malicious outsiders remained the number one cybersecurity threat last year at 72% of all breach incidents. Companies in the healthcare, financial services and retail sectors were the primary targets for breaches last year. However, government and educational institutions were not immune to cyber risks in 2017, making up 22% of all breaches.”

Key takeaways include: “(1) Human error a major risk management and security issue: Accidental loss, consisting of improper disposal of records, misconfigured databases and other unintended security issues, caused 1.9 billion records to be exposed. A dramatic 580% increase in the number of compromised records from 2016. (2) Identity theft is still the number one type of data breach: Identity theft was 69% of all data breach incidents. Over 600 million records were impacted resulting in a 73% increase from 2016. (3) Internal threats are increasing: The number of malicious insider incidents decreased slightly. However, the amount of records stolen increased to 30 million, a 117% increase from 2016.”

Read more at Business Wire.

Photo credit: Gemalto