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Data Breaches in 2021 Already Top All of Last Year: Study  

The tally of data breaches this year is poised to once again set all-time highs, recent reports suggest.

icon 157360 640 smallIn the first three quarters of 2021 alone, the number of publicly reported data breaches in the United States was up 17% from the total for all of 2020. That’s according to a study by the nonprofit Identity Theft Resource Center, and as BankInfoSecurity reports.

Although the amount of reported data breaches fell 9% in the third quarter versus the second quarter, “the trendline continues to point to a record-breaking year for data compromises,” the Identity Theft Resource Center said.

Phishing, ransomware and other “online attacks” were up 23% from full-year 2020 in the first three quarters of this year alone, according to the nonprofit. Supply chain attacks were on the rise and had outsized effects: “Although supply chain attacks only count as a single attack, they impact multiple organizations and the individuals whose data is stored by them.”

Other indicators are similarly on the upswing. As GovTech notes, a report by IBM and the Ponemon Institute recently pegged the average cost of a data breach at $4.24 million in 2021, the most in 17 years. “It remains to be seen what solutions can stem the flow of rising water that is overwhelming many cyber defense programs at the moment,” observes GovTech blogger Dan Lohrmann.

Meanwhile, a new report from Microsoft finds that government agencies constitute the sector most targeted by cyber threat actors between July 2020 and June 2021, with Russia leading the way, as MeriTalk and ZDNet explain.

“During the past year, 58% of all cyberattacks observed by Microsoft from nation-states have come from Russia,” Tom Burt, Microsoft corporate vice president for customer security and trust, said in a blog post. “And attacks from Russian nation-state actors are increasingly effective, jumping from a 21% successful compromise rate last year to a 32% rate this year.”

 

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