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As many as 888 data breach incidents occurred globally in the first six months of 2015, compromising 246 million records, according to the latest Breach Level Index published by digital security company Gemalto. Top 10 breaches accounted for 82% of all compromised records.
The list of top 10 data breach incidents included a massive identity theft attack on India’s music streaming site Gaana.com which affected 10 million-records. The report, quoting The Hacker News, said the records stolen included user names, email addresses, passwords, birthdates, and other personal information. According to a recently released research, Gaana is India’s largest music streaming application.
However, the news is not all that bad. While there was a small 10% increase in number of incidents, the magnitude of the breaches measured in terms of number of records compromised actually saw a massive fall. As compared to second half of 2014, number of records compromised saw a huge 61% fall in H1 2015.
As much as 62% of the breach incidents involved malicious outsider attacks, while accidental loss was the second biggest reason, accounting for 222% of the total data breach incidents. Malicious insiders accounted for 12% of the breach incidents while hacktivists and state sponsored attacks accounted for 2% of breach incidents each.
The Gemalto report also gives insights into type of data breaches. Massive 53% of the data breaches were identity thefts while 22% were attacks to gain financial access.
Healthcare saw the maximum number of breach incidents, accounting for 34% of all such incidents. It was closely followed by government that accounted for 31% of breaches while technology industry accounted for 15% of such breaches. Retail (8%) and education (6%) were the other major victims. Interestingly, the financial services segment accounted for just 1% of the breaches—a testimony to the success of their security and compliance policies.
While North America accounted for every four of the five data breach incidents, Europe was a distant second with just 10% of breach incidents. Within Europe, UK accounted for two-third of all incidents. AsiaPacific, with 63 incidents, took the third place. Australia accounted for 19 incidents while India was at No 2 with 9 incidents, including the Gaana incident. . Notably, China had a much better show with just 6 incidents of data breach in these six months.
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