Malicious outsider data breaches increase almost 300 percent in the year of 2016

Cyber attackers launched 1,792 malicious outsider data breaches in the year of 2016, which led to nearly 1.4 billion data records being compromised worldwide, in accordance to the newly released Breach Level Index (BLI) report from security provider Gemalto.

Identity theft was the leading kind of malicious outsider data breaches previous year, accounting for 59% of all data breaches, the report claimed. More than half of the organizations hit with data breaches (52%) in the year of 2016 didn’t reveal the number of compromised records at the time they were reported.

The BLI is an international database that tracks data breaches and measures their severity deployed on multiple factors such as the number of records compromised, type of data, and source of the breach, how the data was utilized, and whether or not the information was encrypted.

By allocating a severity score to each breach, the BLI gives a comparative list of breaches, distinguishing data breaches that aren’t serious from those that are really impactful, Gemalto said. In accordance to the BLI, more than 7 billion data records have been exposed since the year of 2013, when the index started benchmarking publicly disclosed data breaches. That amounts to more than 3 million records compromised daily.

In the year of 2016, the top ten breaches in terms of severity accounted for more than half of all compromised records. Identity theft was the cause of 59% of all data breaches, up 5% from the year of 2015. The second most prevalent kind of breach in 2016 was account access based breaches. While the tragedy of this type of data breach reduced by 3 percent, it made up 54% of all breached records. That is an increase of 336% from the last year.

This mentions the cybercriminal trend from financial data attacks to bigger databases with large volumes of personally identifiable information, the report stated.

Malicious outsider data breaches were the leading source of data breaches, accounting for 68% of the attacks, up from 13% in 2015. The number of records breached in malicious outsider attacks increased by 286% from 2015.

"The Breach Level Index reflects 4 major cybercriminal trends over the last year. Hackers are casting a wider net and are using conveniently attainable account and identity information as a starting point for high value targets. Clearly, fraudsters are also shifting from attacks targeted at financial agencies to infiltrating large data bases like entertainment and social media sites. Lastly, fraudsters have been using encryption to make breached data unreadable, then hold it for ransom and decrypting once they are paid," stated Jason Hart, Vice President and Chief Technology Officer for Data Protection at Gemalto.