Ride the Lightning

Risk Based Security Releases 2016 Data Breach Report

January 25, 2017

Today, Risk Based Security released its annual Data Breach report for 2016. Here are a few of the findings:

• There were 4,149 breaches reported during 2016 exposing over 4.2 billion records – approximately 3.2 billion more records than the previous all-time high exposed in 2013.
• Top 10 breaches (9 Hacks1 and 1 Web) exposed a combined 3 billion records.
• Top 10 Severity scores averaged 9.96 out of 10.0.
• The Business sector accounted for 51% of reported breaches, followed by Unknown (23.4%), Government (11.7%), Medical (9.2%), and Education (4.7%).
• The Business sector accounted for 80.9% of the number of records exposed, followed by Unknown (13.1%), Government (5.6%), Medical (.3%), and Education < .1%.
• 53.3% of reported breaches were the result of Hacking, which accounted for 91.9% of the exposed records.
• Malware accounted for 4.5% of the reported breaches, but represented just 0.4% of the records compromised.
• Breaches involving U.S. entities accounted for 47.5% of the breaches and 68.2% of the exposed records.
• 37.2% of the breaches exposed between one and 1,000 records, 50.4% of breaches exposed between one and 10,000 records.
• 256 breaches involved Third Parties.
• Ninety-four (94) breaches in 2016 exposed one million or more records.
• Six (6) 2016 breaches have taken their place on the Top 10 List of All Time Largest Breaches.
• In December 2016, Yahoo reported the single largest breach ever disclosed, impacting over 1 billion records.
• The number of reported breaches tracked by Risk Based Security has exceeded 23,700, exposing over 9.2 billion records.

Looks like job security for my line of work remains very darn good.

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