Cybersecurity » Data Breaches Down, Financial Impact Up

Data Breaches Down, Financial Impact Up

July 18, 2019

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A report by the Internet Society’s Online Trust Alliance says Cyber incidents in the U.S. led to an estimated loss of $45 billion in 2018. The financial impact of ransomware increased by 60 percent. Cryptojacking incidents more than tripled from the year before while financial losses from the compromise of business emails doubled. The report examined financial fallout from 2 million cyber incidents. These included ransomware attacks, record exposures and data breaches. Overall data breaches leading to the exposure of personal records went down in 2018, with 5 billion records exposed, a decrease of 35.9 percent. According to Jeff Wilbur, the OTA’s technical director, that was not as positive as it sounds. “There may be fewer data breaches, but the number of cyber incidents and their financial impact is far greater than we’ve seen in the past,” he said. According to the report, 95 percent of data breaches were preventable through following “simple and common-sense approaches to improving security” – educating employees on data security and privacy and establishing relationships with data protection authorities.

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