Cyber Security [Breaches, Trends & Services]

While it is likely that the cyber security breach activity of 2018 won’t reach 2017 levels, a look back at the first nine months suggests that 2018 is on pace to be another significant year for data breaches, according to ‘Risk Based Security’.

The 2018 Q3 Data Breach Report found that 3,676 data compromise incidents were reported between January and September, exposing 3.6 billion records.  ”Despite the consistent pace at which disclosures are reported, 2018 is not expected to see the number of breaches reported in 2017. However the overall trend continues to be greater ‘mega breaches’ impacting hundreds of millions of records at once.”

”Of the 3.6 billion records exposed, 64% were from the business sector and 100 million records were stolen in only seven of the 3,676 breaches. The 10 largest cyber security breaches accounted for 85% of the records exposed year to date. According to the report, criminals often used fraud  accounting for 36% of exposed records, while hacking led the pack in number of incidents, accounting for 57% of reported breaches. An additional key finding of the report noted the lack of transparency that continues among breached companies in 2018. 35% of impacted companies were unwilling or unable to disclose the number of records exposed.”