Research shows that 65% of all data breaches involved identity theft

Billions of data records compromised worldwide in 2018. Source: shutterstock.com

945 data breaches led to 4.5 billion data records being compromised worldwide in the first half of 2018. These are the latest findings of the Breach Level Index by Gemalto, a global database that tracks data breaches and measures their severity based on multiple dimensions, including the number of records compromised, the type of data, the source of the breach, how the data was used, and whether or not the data was encrypted.

According to the Index, the number of lost, stolen or compromised records increased by a staggering 133% year-over-year. The total number of breaches slightly decreased over the same period, signaling an increase in the severity of each incident. Thus a total of six social media breaches, including the Cambridge Analytica-Facebook incident, accounted for over 56% of total records compromised. 20% of all breaches had an unknown or unaccounted number of compromised data records. Check out Gemalto’s infographics to find out more about data breaches.

“Obviously, this year social media has been the top industry and threat vector for the compromise of personal data, a trend we can expect to continue with more and more sectors leveraging these platforms to reach key audiences, especially political teams gearing up for major elections,” said Jason Hart, vice president and chief technology officer for data protection at Gemalto. “We also expect to see more data breaches reported by European Union countries bound by the new General Data Protection Regulation and in Australia with the new Notifiable Data Breaches law. We should be careful not to misconstrue this as an increase in overall incidents in these areas but rather as a more accurate reflection of what is actually going on.”

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