291 Breaches per Second? What the Records DON’T Show

Last week, Gemalto’s Breach Level Index was released, giving valuable insight into data breaches and some alarming trends:

Records per Breach is Growing:

The general rise in the volume of lost records is alarming enough (1H 2018’s figure is up 1,751% on 1H 2015), but what’s really scary is the average number of records per data breach incident. It’s growing quickly.

• 2015: 245.9m records across 999 incidents. That’s 276,936 records per incident.
• 2016: 554.5m records across 974 incidents. That’s 569,255 records per incident.
• 2017: 2.6bn records across 1765 incidents. That’s 1.47m records per incident.
• 2018: 4.5bn records across 945 breaches. That’s 4.8m records per incident.

Where did the biggest breaches happen? On Social Media:

Facebook: 2,100,000,000 Records

Facebook revealed that malicious actors could have abused its search and account recovery capabilities to scrape public profile information from most of its more than 2 billion users. As Facebook’s CTO Mike Schroepfer explained at the time, “Given the scale and sophistication of the activity we’ve seen, we believe most people on Facebook [over 2 billion users] could have had their public profile scraped in this way.” The tech giant responded by disabling the feature and changing its account recovery process to reduce the risk of scraping.

Twitter: 336,000,000 Records

Twitter urged all its more than 330 million users to change their passwords after a software glitch exposed their credentials in plaintext. The glitch involved the failure of Twitter’s hashing process to scramble users’ passwords prior to writing them to an internal computer log, causing them to be recorded in readable text. According to Reuters’ reporting on May 3, the social lnetworking service launched an internal investigation after discussing the issue, an exposure which one source said had persisted for “several months” prior to discovery

What the data DIDN’T Tell You…

What’s missing? Where this data sits… you need look no further than your smartphone sitting on your bedside table. Over 51% of teens use their smartphones to access social media platforms. With the biggest breaches happening on social media platforms, what are the chances a breach with one of your company-issued smart devices could hamper your data-protection protocols?

What to Do?

Securely destroy outmoded laptops, smartphones, tablets. Update the software regularly and caution employees to NOT utilize social media on company devices. Ship n Destroy helps IT Departments scrub hard-drives and securely destroy smart devices for as low as $10 (in some cases, even FREE!) Learn more at http:shipndestroy.com