Around 14,6 billion records stolen since 2013

Oct 10, 2018 20:18 GMT  ·  By

The number of records stolen in the first half of 2018 reached an astonishing 4,553,172,708, an increase of 133 percent over the first half of 2017 according to a report from Gemalto.

Moreover, although there was a noticeable increase in the number of data breach incidents in H1 2018 when compared to the same period of 2017, the number of events was lower, with only 945 for 2018 and 1,162 for 2017.

Gemalto reports that 6,947,320 records are stolen every day considering that 14,644,949,623 items were compromised since 2013, with only 4% of them being encrypted.

When calculating stats for the number of stolen or lost records by industry, social media companies have a substantial lead over all other sectors with 56.11% of all stolen records, followed by governments which lost 26.62% of all compromised data items.

Furthermore, 56.08% of all data breaches were due to a malicious outsider with the total number of data records being lost because of external attackers rising more than 1,000% to 3.6 billion stolen records.

Social media and government agencies lead the top of stolen records sorted by industry

Accidental loss and malicious insiders follow closely, with 33.65% and 6.46% respectively, with a sharp drop of 47% of items lost due to accidents going down to 900 million.

Gemalto classified the data breach incident types into identity theft, accounts access, financial access, nuisance, and existential data, with identity theft events leading with 64.55% of all data theft incidents, followed by account access at 17.47% and financial access with 13.02%.

During 2018 governments introduces some new data privacy regulations designed to organizations affected by data breaches to provide better privacy and security measures for their customer data.

"One of the most notable of these developments was the introduction of new data protection regulations including the European Union's General Data Protection Regulation (GDPR), New York's Cybersecurity Requirements for Financial Services Companies and Australia's Notifiable Data Breach (NDB) scheme," says Gemalto's report.

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Data breach statistics for H1 2018
Top 10 data breaches by risk scoreNumber of lost data records sorted by industry
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