Data Breaches

The European Union Agency for Network and Information Security (ENISA) recently released the ENISA Threat Landscape 2015, a report which identifies the top 15 cyber threats experienced in the 2015 calendar year. In this fourth annual report, malware was identified as the top cyber threat, followed by web-based attacks and web application attacks, consistent with the trends of the previous year.

IDC predicts that, by 2020, 1.5 billion people - a quarter of the world’s population - will be affected by data breaches. Data breach incidents in the UK were up in 2015 across all sectors, with a particularly large spike in incidents in the healthcare sector.

More than half of data breaches in the UK public sector originate from insiders, according to a new survey. 8MAN's Public Sector Data and Information Security Survey, which surveyed 600 IT professionals in the UK public sector (local authorities, healthcare, education), found that human error, rather than malicious intent, was to blame for many of the insider data breaches. When it came to large organizations alone, those insiders accounted...

The ease with which digital data can seamlessly move across geographic boundaries has strained the ability of lawmakers throughout the world to develop privacy laws and regulations that can protect their citizens’ personal information wherever that data may exist. These days, when even the smallest of start-ups can effortlessly operate globally, the difficulties caused by these strains are becoming more and more apparent.

In 2014, data breaches rose to such an extent that we called it “The Year of the Data Breach.” Unfortunately, data breaches in 2015 exceeded those figures, with 781 breaches of 169 million records exposed, up from the 83 million records exposed in 2014. Breaches are up, with mega-breaches affecting the US Government’s Office of Personnel Management, CVS and T-Mobile. And there’s no end in sight.