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Cyber Security: Number of Breaches Way up in 2016. Incident Reporting is More Frequent, but so the the Frequency of Hacking
2016 was not a good year for cyber security. Major reported data breaches in 2016 hit a record high of 1093, according to the Identity Theft Resource Center (ITRC). That’s a 40 percent jump over the number of incidents reported in 2015. In terms of actual records exposed, there were 36.7 million, which contained information like license numbers, social security numbers, credit card numbers, banks and financial data, and medical records.
Phishing and hacking incidents accounted for nearly 56 percent of the breaches, while accidental exposure to email information accounted for 9 percent of the total, and employee errors accounted for another 9 percent.
One question is whether or not the higher number of reported breaches is due to the fact that breaches are now more likely to be reported or whether there simply are considerably more breaches and hacking attempts occurring.
Eva Velasquez, president and CEO of ITRC, said that “it is our opinion that both are factors here, but that it is more likely that breaches are actually being discovered due to more robust security measures being in place.”
But many businesses are reluctant to report cyber incidents because they are worried about any damage it may do to their reputations.
Adam Levin, founder of CyberScout, said that “I know, based on my experience being out there, that more and more people are experiencing attacks, and a lot of them don’t report; a lot of organizations do everything they can to avoid reporting an attack.”
