How much do you know about data breaches?

Intentional or unintentional release of secure information

• A data breach is a security violation in which sensitive, protected or confidential data is copied, transmitted, viewed, stolen, altered or used by an individual unauthorized to do so.
• Data breaches may involve financial information such as credit card and debit card details, bank details, personal health information (PHI), Personally identifiable information (PII), trade secrets of corporations or intellectual property.
• Data breaches can be quite costly to organizations with direct costs (remediation, investigation, etc.) and indirect costs (reputational damages, providing cybersecurity to victims of compromised data, etc.).
• According to the nonprofit consumer organization Privacy Rights Clearinghouse, a total of 227,052,199 individual records containing sensitive personal information were involved in security breaches in the United States between January 2005 and May 2008, excluding incidents where sensitive data was not exposed.
• Many jurisdictions have passed data breach notification laws, which require a company that has been subject to a data breach to inform customers and take other steps to remediate possible injuries.
• Estimates of breaches caused by accidental "human factor" errors are around 20% by the Verizon 2021 Data Breach Investigations Report.
• In health care, more than 25 million people have had their health care stolen, resulting in the identity theft of more than 6 million people.
• Several studies have been published with varying findings to assess the impact of data breaches.
• From 2017 to 2021, the predicted global spending on internet security is to be over $1 trillion.
• Notable data breaches have occurred in various sectors from 2005 to 2022.
• Data breaches may involve overexposed and vulnerable unstructured data – files, documents, and sensitive information.
• Insider threats are a significant cause of data breaches, while external threats include hackers, cybercriminal organizations, and state-sponsored actors.