Security Breaches Two Times Worse This Year Than The Last One

When it comes to security breaches, nowadays, numbers go sky high. And when I say numbers, I mean everything - money spent, people affected, number of credentials stolen etc etc. Hackers have started to score big - they go for the giants, hit them hard, steal data then launch huge spam-scam campaigns or who knows what else. The fact that they've seen the financial gain in cyber-crime motivates them to act like this. Now, breaches are a lot worse than they were in 2006 or 2005.

Now, as seen in the CompTIA study - security breach level for the past 12 months was at 4.8. So, what does this mean? Well, it's a simple 0 to 10 scale, where 0 means that the breach was something unimportant, while 10 means that the breach was most severe. So, as you can see, it's very close to a 5. The ratings for the past two years were 2.3. and 2.6, so things are heading for the worst, and fast! I think you've all heard of the Monster situation, when Monster dot com had been hacked and millions of people's data had been phished.

"This suggests that while the number of security breaches has stabilized, the breaches that are occurring are having a greater impact than ever on organizations," said Brian McCarthy, chief operating officer, CompTIA.

Organizations broke down their costs of security breaches as follows:

-Employee productivity impacted 35 percent
-Server or network downtime 21 percent
-Revenue-generating activities impacted 20 percent
-Physical assets impacted 17 percent
-Legal fees and/or fines 8 percent

Of course, the most affected ones are the large companies. It's not that the small ones have a lot better security and stuff like that, it's just the fact that bigger fish means bigger interest. Hackers are not stupid - why make a lot of efforts to steal the data of 400 people, when while doing the same with a large company, you could steal the sensitive info of 400.000 people?