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Data Breaches Head for Another Record Year in 2020

The impact from data breaches is on pace to hit an all-time high once again in 2020, new research finds.

cyber security 1776319 640In the first three months of 2020, 1.6 billion records were exposed in U.S. data breaches, up 9% from the same period a year earlier, according to a report by identity management software company ForgeRock. The increase in records compromised came even as the number of individual data-breach incidents tumbled 57% to just 92 breaches.

Social media companies accounted for the most records exposed during the first quarter of 2020, according to ForgeRock. Healthcare suffered the most data-breach incidents, representing slightly more than half of breaches in the first months of the year. Medical details accounted for 25% of records targeted in the period, the most of any data type.

Throughout all of 2019, more than 5 billion records were compromised in U.S. data breaches, up 79% from 2018, when 2.8 billion records were affected, according to ForgeRock. The total cost of 2019 U.S. breaches was $1.2 trillion, up from $654 billion in 2018.

The industry hardest hit financially by breaches was technology, with a cost of $250 billion from more than 1.3 billion breached records last year, the report finds. While personally identifiable information was exposed in 98% of 2019 breaches, Social Security numbers and birthdates represented 37% of breached records, down from 54% the previous year.

Unauthorized access was the most common type of breach last year, according to ForgeRock, accounting for 40% of breaches. Ransomware/malware was next at 15%, followed by phishing attacks at 14%.

Separately, a survey of 300 U.S. chief information security officers by IDC on behalf of cloud access risk company Ermetic finds that almost 80% said they had sustained at least one cloud data breach in the past 18 months. And 43% said they had seen 10 or more breaches over that period.

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