Data Breaches

The total number of breaches recorded by the 2016 ITRC Breach Report hit 489 last week, an increase of 19.8% over last year’s figures. Year-over-year, breaches in the Education sector are up 70 percent over 2015 figures.

A recent survey showed that 63% of organizations in Australia experienced a cybersecurity incident or breach in 2015, with more than half of them listed as “serious.” Large scale breaches such as those experienced by Kmart and David Jones, and widely publicized breaches at Aussie Farmers Direct and Queensland TAFE, rocked consumer confidence on the state of data security in Australia.

The Sixth Annual Benchmark Study on Privacy and Security of Healthcare Data by the Ponemon Institute, on behalf of ID Experts, shows the continued targeting of healthcare organizations, due in large part to the high value of healthcare data.

The Government in the UK recently released its Cyber Security Breaches Survey 2016, a survey which looks at the approach to cyber security by UK businesses in order to better inform Government policy and security recommendations to businesses. According to the report, two thirds of large UK businesses suffered a cyber attack or breach in the past year, with 68% of those breaches caused by viruses, spyware and malware...

The California Attorney General, Kamala D. Harris, has released a report detailing the data breaches that have affected Californians since 2012. The California Data Breach Report analyzes 657 data breaches that affected the records of over 49 million Californians, with substantial year-to-year increases. In 2015 alone, 178 breaches put over 24 million records at risk; that means 1 in 3 Californians were affected by a data breach in a...