Gemalto Breach Level Index Study: 3.24 million records stolen or compromised in 2017

Gemalto  released the latest findings of the Breach Level Index, revealing that 3.24 million records were stolen, lost or exposed in India in 2017, 783% increase from 2016. Globally, 2017 was the first year publicly disclosed breaches surpassed more than two billion compromised data records since the Breach Level Index began tracking data breaches in 2013.

Over the past five years, nearly 10 billion records have been lost, stolen or exposed, with an average of five million records compromised globally every day.

Of the 29 data breach incidents in India in 2017, identity theft represented the leading type of data breach, accounting for 58% of all data breaches. Malicious outsiders remained the number one cybersecurity threat last year at 52% of all breach incidents.  Companies in the retail, government and financial services sectors were the primary targets for breaches last year.

The Breach Level Index* serves as a global database that tracks and analyzes data breaches, the type of data compromised and how it was accessed, lost or stolen. Based on data breach reports collected in the Breach Level Index, the major 2017 highlights include:

• Human error a major risk management and security issue: Accidental loss, consisting of improper disposal of records, misconfigured databases and other unintended security issues, caused 3.7 million records to be exposed.
• Identity theft is still the number one type of data breach: Identity theft was 77% of all data breach incidents.
• What a nuisance: The number of records breached in nuisance type attacks which were not seen in 2016 have started to happen in 2017.  Such attacks have compromised 200 million records this year.  The Breach Level Index defines a data breach as a nuisance when the compromised data includes basic information such as name, address and/or phone number. The larger ramification of this type of breach is often unknown, as hackers use this data to orchestrate other attacks.

Data Breaches by Type
Identity theft was the leading type of data breach, accounting for 77% of all incidents in 2017. The second most prevalent type of breach was access to government data (28%). The number of malicious outsiders increased the most for nuisance type of data breaches (488%) which constituted 98% of all compromised data.

Data Breaches by Industry
In 2017, the industries that experienced the largest number of data breach incidents were government (28%), retail (21%), education (17%) and healthcare (7%). In terms of the amount of records lost, stolen or compromised, the most targeted sectors were government (62%) and technology (37%)

Data Breaches by Source
Malicious outsiders were the leading source of data breaches, accounting for 52%% of breaches, however making up 98.8%  all compromised data. Malicious insider breaches were 14% of the total number of incidents, however this breach source experienced a dramatic increase (33%) in the number of compromised or stolen records from 2016.