By FintechNews staff
-Like every year, 2021 also saw some major cybersecurity breaches and data leaks that exposed the personal information of millions of people online. In addition, the pandemic made many companies go online, and this gave an opportunity to hackers to get more creative and use sophisticated tools to carry out their work.
-The Identity Theft Research Center reports the number of data breaches so far this year has already surpassed the total number in 2020 by 17%. Phishing and ransomware are the two most popular tools of hackers, says the ITRC.
-More than 98.2 million individuals were impacted by the 10 biggest data breaches in the first half of 2021.
-A new research study by Skybox Security found that 83% of organizations suffered an operational technology (OT) cybersecurity breach in the prior 36 months. The research also uncovered that organizations underestimate the risk of a cyberattack, with 73% of CIOs and CISOs “highly confident” their organizations will not suffer an OT breach in the next year.
-According to a 2021 report from IBM and the Ponemon Institute, the average cost of a data breach among companies surveyed reached $4.24 million per incident in 2021, the highest in 17 years.
-Stolen user credentials were the most common root cause of breaches in the study. At the same time, customer personal data (such as name, email, password) was the most common type of information exposed in data breaches — with 44 percent of breaches including this type of data.
-Cyberattacks on healthcare have continued to plague the sector since the start of the COVID-19 pandemic. Over 10 million records have been stolen, of every type, including social security numbers, patient medical records, financial data, HIV test results and private details of medical donors. Health records are low-risk, high reward targets for cybercriminals
-To date, compliance standards have proven insufficient in preventing security incidents.
– The adoption of AI, security analytics and encryption were the top-three mitigating factors shown to reduce the cost of a breach, saving companies between $1.25 million and $1.49 million compared to those who did not have significant usage of these tools.
To go deeper on these subjects:
-List of data breaches and cyber attacks in September 2021 – 91 million records breached
-MORE Alarming Cybersecurity Stats For 2021 !
–Roundup: 2021 Energy & Utility Data Breaches and Defenses in the News
-Op-Ed: What a house cat can teach us about cybersecurity
