Gemalto research shows data breaches less frequent but larger so far in 2018

More than 4.5 billion digital records have been compromised in data breaches during the first half of 2018, according to research from Gemalto.

The “2018: Data Privacy and New Regulations Take Center Stage” report shows a troubling 133 percent increase in breached records observed by its Breach Level Index (BLI) system, despite the total number of breach incidents falling by 18.7 percent to 945. The most disturbing finding of the report may be the use of encryption to protect some or all of the data stolen in only 21 of those security incidents, well under 3 percent of the total, and less than half the total from the previous year.

GenKey recently launched the latest version of its ABIS with certificate-based encrypted communication to protect against attacks.

The main reason for the increase in the number of records per breach is the types of breach that occurred in the first half of 2018. A breach of Facebook security which allowed hackers to steal public profile information for 2.23 billion users was the worst of half a dozen social media breaches, followed by a Twitter software glitch which made password storage insecure for all 330 million users. Social media accounted for more than 2.55 billion total compromised records.

Europe, the Middle East, and Africa accounted for just 46 breaches, less than 5 percent of the global total, while more than half occurred in the U.S. (559), and nearly a third took place in Australia (308).

The report also examines other trends related to data security and privacy, including the recent introduction of new data regulations, such as the European Union’s General Data Protection Rule (GDPR), New York’s Cybersecurity Requirements for Financial Services Companies, and Australia’s Notifiable Data Breach (NDB) requirements.

Research from Pindrop suggests that the frequency of data breaches, along with increasing use of the voice channel, is driving an increase in voice fraud.

Article Topics

access management  |  authentication  |  data protection  |  Gemalto  |  social media