Ride the Lightning

2018: US Businesses Lost $264 Billion to Cyberattacks

June 10, 2019

Bitdefender reported on June 6th that U.S. businesses lost $264 billion to 2018 cyberattacks in which criminals exposed 2.8 billion consumer data records. Healthcare, financial services and government were the sectors hardest hit by cyberattacks, according to a report from ForgeRock.

Cyberattacks against U.S. financial services dealt $6.2 billion worth of damage in the first quarter of 2019 alone, a steep rise from just $8 million in the same quarter of last year. Though businesses have increased their investments in information security products and services ($114 billion invested in 2018), cyberattacks still succeed against organizations across a wide spectrum of industries.

97% of all breaches in 2018 targeted personally identifiable information (PII). Date of birth and/or Social Security Numbers were the most frequently compromised type of PII in 2018, with 54% of breaches exposing this data. Name and physical address (49%) and personal health information (46%) were the second and third most commonly compromised type of PII.

34% of attacks were performed through unauthorized access, mainly by stealing employee credentials through social engineering methods, like phishing.

Bad actors have increasingly targeted healthcare organizations in the past few years, something the study further corroborates – 48% of all consumer data breaches took place in the healthcare sector. This is four times more than any other sector, researchers calculate. Financial services and government were the second and third most victimized industries, together comprising a fifth of all breaches.

Ransomware was the second most frequent attack type in 2018, an expected outcome given the popularity of this malware in attacks against the healthcare industry.

If you have the sense that we are steadily losing ground in this war, you're right.

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