Increasing number of data breaches

17 million records were exposed in the malicious outsider attack on food delivery app Zomato making it one of the biggest global data breaches of 2017. If you are thinking that the year 2017 was a digitally secure one, you are in for a shock. Recently, the well known digital security firm Gemalto released its ‘Breach level Index’ according to which a total of 203.7 million data records were compromised in 18 data breaches in India alone. This means that if we compare the figures with that of the last six months of 2016, we will see that the number of lost, compromised or stolen records increased by 167 million. Over 60% of these data breach incidents happened due to identity theft.

Globally, a large chunk of the 1.9 billion stolen or compromised data records came from the 22 largest data breaches with each of them involving more than one million compromised records. Infact, most of the firms breached had their share price negatively impacted. The 65 companies that were subjected to the breach cumulatively cost their shareholders over $52.4 billion. Of the 918 data breaches recorded worldwide, more than 500 have an unaccounted number of compromised data records. Malicious outsiders accounted for 74 percent of the total data breaches. It is alarming to note that the figures are 23 percent greater than that of 2016. With the increasing number data breaches that are happening, we can only hope that offenders are identified at the earliest and stringent action is taken against them; else the world is doomed to darker days ahead.