Intelligent CISO Issue 07 | Page 18

cyber trends Social media ranked top for the number of records breached GEMALTO, A WORLD LEADER IN DIGITAL SECURITY, HAS RELEASED THE LATEST FINDINGS OF THE BREACH LEVEL INDEX, A GLOBAL DATABASE OF PUBLIC DATA BREACHES. T he latest findings of Gemalto’s Breach Level Index revealed that 945 data breaches led to 4.5 billion data records being compromised worldwide in the first half of 2018. Compared to the same period in 2017, the number of lost, stolen or compromised records increased by a staggering 133%, though the total number of breaches slightly decreased over the same period, signalling an increase in the severity of each incident. A total of six social media breaches, including the Cambridge Analytica and Facebook incident, accounted for more than 56% of total records compromised. Of the 945 data breaches, 189 (20% of all breaches) had an unknown or unaccounted number of compromised data records. 18 Data breaches compromised 4.5 billion records in first half of 2018 In the United Arab Emirates, two data breaches were recorded with more than 14 million comprised data records. In addition, the Telecommunications Regulations Authority (TRA) reported that a total of 274 cyberattacks targeted at government, semi-government and private sector entities in the UAE were recorded in the first seven months of 2018. incidents are getting faster and larger in scope. The Breach Level Index is a global database that tracks data breaches and measures their severity based on multiple dimensions, including the number of records compromised, the type of data, the source of the breach, how the data was used and whether or not the data was encrypted. Despite an overall decline in the number of data breaches, Gemalto’s Breach Level Index data suggests that security By assigning a severity score to each breach, the Breach Level Index provides a comparative list of breaches, Issue 07 | www.intelligentciso.com