According to Q1 2019 Data Breach QuickView Report conducted by Risk Based Security, a total of 1903 publicly disclosed data breaches have been registered in the first three months of the year. These breaches exposed more than 1.9 billion records making the first quarter of 2019, well, pretty bad in terms of privacy.
Researchers Increasingly Reporting Sizeable Data Breaches
According to Inga Goddijn, executive vice president and head of Cyber Risk Analytics, “researchers are increasingly going public when they discover sizable, unprotected databases containing sensitive information and unfortunately, they aren’t terribly difficult to find when you know where to look.” Thus, it isn’t that surprising that 67.7% of compromised records for the mentioned period stemmed from exposure on the Internet.
One of the more interesting conclusions based on the compiled findings is that there’s a correlation between discovery method and disclosure time of a data breach. Apparently, organizations that were alerted through an external source, be it security researchers or law enforcement or other form of disclosure, were on average 31 days quicker to go public about the event than organizations that discovered it internally.
The researchers’ hypothesis that internally discovered breaches are reported to the public more promptly was shattered. “We will be following this metric closely throughout the year. For now, it’s too early to say whether the result we found for this quarter is an outlier or a fairly typical outcome,” Risk Based Security said.
Just yesterday we reported a huge data breach that impacted Canada’s fourth biggest telecom provider. Uto 1.5 million active customers of Freedom Mobile may have been affected by the data compromise event. The security team that discovered the breach had full access to more than 5 million records.
It is curious to note that Freedom Mobile’s estimations of affected customers are quite different. The company says that not more than 15,000 customers were impacted in the data breach, adding that the incident is associated with a new third-part company, Apptium Technologies, which was recently assigned to deal with retail systems.
By the looks of it, the number of data breaches throughout 2019 will continue to rise.
Milena Dimitrova
An inspired writer and content manager who has been with SensorsTechForum since the project started. A professional with 10+ years of experience in creating engaging content. Focused on user privacy and malware development, she strongly believes in a world where cybersecurity plays a central role. If common sense makes no sense, she will be there to take notes. Those notes may later turn into articles! Follow Milena @Milenyim
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