Poor security led to over a billion stolen records last year: report

13 Feb 2015

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More than 1 billion data records were stolen last year from 1,500 individual data breaches new research suggests.

The latest findings from Gemalto, an enterprise security firm, represented a significant year-over-year increase in both corporate breaches and data theft.

Hundreds of millions of records had been stolen this year through hacks and data breaches due to poor, or flawed security.  

Data breaches increased 49 per cent, while the theft or loss of data records rose 78 per cent on the year prior.

Security emerged as top concern last year after a number of high-profile attacks on banks and retailers.

The largest security breaches in US history, occurred at Banking giant JPMorgan Chase, and retailer Target, however, concerns over data security continued into the new year with health insurance provider Anthem, reporting 80 million records taken.

The attacks were more in the nature of identity theft, rather than having financial motivation.

Attacks that target personal information, like credit cards and Social Security addresses, comprised one-third of the most severe cases of breaches, a ranking based on the firm's threat level index.

According to Gemalto executive Tsion Gonen, what was evident was a clear shift in the tactics of cybercriminals, with long-term identity theft becoming more of a goal than the immediacy of stealing a credit card number.

According to the study 54 per cent of data-hacking incidents focused on identity theft, and only 17 per cent of hacks were designed to access financial information, while 11 per cent sought account access. Gemalto said hacking identities rather than financial information provided hackers more benefits than a short-term spending spree.

"Identity theft could lead to the opening of new fraudulent credit accounts, creating false identities for criminal enterprises, or a host of other serious crimes. As data breaches become more personal, we're starting to see that the universe of risk exposure for the average person is expanding," Gonen said in a statement.

The Anthem attack was the latest in a series of breaches across companies and in a little over a year, hackers had stolen 56 million credit card numbers (See: Hackers strike US health insurance giant Anthem; steal millions of personal data) and 53 million email addresses from Home Depot; contact information for 76 million households and 7 million small businesses from JPMorgan's vaults; and 40 million credit and debit card numbers and personal information on 110 million customers from Target.

 

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