Online Extra: Severity of Data Breaches Increases In First Half of 2018

Need more ammo to convince the C-suite that investing in cybersecurity is a good idea? A new report from Gemalto may do the trick, showing how the severity of breaches has increased in the past year alone.

According to Gemalto's 2018 Breach Level Index, 4.5 billion records were stolen, lost or compromised worldwide in the first half of 2018, representing a 133 percent increase over the first half of 2017. In addition, 42.7 billion records were potentially exposed to a breach in the first half of 2018, up from 17.0 billion over the first half of 2017.

Interestingly, this increase occurred even though the total number of disclosed breach incidents decreased, from 1,162 in 2017 to 945 in 2018. This was largely due to a few large breaches exposing more than 100 million people, including those at Facebook, Exactis, Under Armour, and the Indian government's Aadhaar service.

In the report, Gemalto noted that new regulations such as the EU's General Data Protection Regulation (GDPR), New York's financial cybersecurity requirements, and Australia's Notifiable Data Breach scheme, could lead to increased reporting of breaches that may not have been previously disclosed.

“The rationale behind passing these standards is to help organizations better protect customers' privacy and security by design,” the report said. “But the regulations aren't without their drawbacks for businesses. Not only do they impose additional costs in terms of compliance; they also lead to an increase in the number of reported breaches.”

When looking at how these breaches occurred, malicious outsiders were the main source, comprising 56% of all breach incidents and 80% of all breached records. Accidental loss, which was the leading source of breach incidents during the first half of 2017, fell to just 34% of all breach incidents during the first half of 2018.

And when breaking down breaches by type of intrusion, identity theft was the frontrunner at 65% of all breach incidents and 87% of all breach records. Identity theft was followed by account access and financial access, at 17% and 13% of all breach incidents, respectively.

In the end, the report says that it will be key for organizations  is to not only spend on cybersecurity, but spend wisely. Spending on technologies that simply monitor and protect an organization's perimeter will likely not have the effectiveness that they once had.

“Since the traditional perimeter of the enterprise has been blown up by the cloud, the new perimeter is the data itself and the users accessing that data,” the report said. “Mindsets need to change to adapt to this reality, and IT professionals need to accept that breaches will occur and attach security directly to the data itself and the users.”

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Zach Warren is the Editor-in-Chief of Legaltech News, an ALM sibling of Cybersecurity Law & Strategy. He can be reached at [email protected].