Data Breaches Increased Significantly in 2016.

SiliconRepublic recently reported on new research indicating the increasing global damage of security breaches.  The research was conducted by the digital security agency Gemalto, using its global Breach Level Index (BRI) that tracks data breaches.  The BRI also measures the severity of the breaches on many dimensions such as 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.  Each breach is assigned a severity score with 10 being the highest severity level. Gemalto’s research indicated that 1,792 data record breaches occurred last year, constituting an 86 percent increase in breaches since 2015.  A total of 1.4 billion data records were affected as a result.

The identity category was the most compromised area of digital security, accounting for 59 percent of all breaches.  Account access breaches were the second most compromised area.  These breaches resulted in a 336 percent increase in the number of records accessed since 2015.  After the technology sector, the healthcare field was the most heavily impacted.  Healthcare breaches formed 28 percent of all targeted breaches, increasing 11 percent since 2015.

The SiliconRepublic report is available at:

https://www.siliconrepublic.com/enterprise/data-breaches-by-numbers-2016.