Gemalto issued a report that “identity theft breaches continues to remain high and result in many records being stolen shows that organizations are still not adequately addressing this threat.” The September 2017 report entitled “2017 Poor Internal Security Practices Take a Toll” included these comments:
A large portion of accidental loss are the result of poor internal security practices or unsecure databases.
One of the main takeaways from the findings is that security needs to be comprehensive, not only including tools such as network protection and access controls, but data encryption and multi-factor authentication as well so in the event of a breach cyber criminals will not be able to doing anything with the stolen information.
Gemalto’s “Data breach statistics 2017: First half results are in” about the report stated:
- The huge international data breach problem becomes palpable when you consider that Gemalto has discovered 1,901,866,611 compromised data records in just the first half of 2017.
- In fact, IDC predicts that by 2020, more than 1.5 billion people, or roughly a quarter of the world’s population, will be affected by data breaches.
- The United States has been continuously the world leader in data breach incidents.
- Of the 918 breaches, 801 of them occurred in the US. The UK places a distant second with 40 incidents, and Canada’s third with 26.
No surprises, but these are pretty gloomy prospects for the future!