Gemalto releases first half 2017 Breach Level Index report

The index is a global database of public data breaches and has revealed that 918 data breaches led to 1.9 billion data records being compromised worldwide in the first half of 2017.

For the first six months of 2017, identity theft was the leading type of data breach in terms of incident, accounting for 74% of all data breaches, up 49% from the previous semester. The number of records compromised in identity theft breaches increased by 255%. The most significant shift was the nuisance category of data breaches representing 81% of all lost, stolen or compromised records. However, in terms of the number of incidents, nuisance type attacks were only slightly over 1% of all data breaches. The number of compromised records from account access attacks declined by 46%, after a significant spike in the 2016 BLI full year report.

In terms of industries affected by data breaches, education witnessed one of the largest increases in breaches up by 103% with an increase of over 4,000% in the number of records. Financial services, government and entertainment were also industries that experienced a significant jump in the number of breached records, with entertainment breach incidents increasing 220% in the first six months of 2017.

North America still makes up the majority of all breaches and the number of compromised records, both above 86%. The number of breaches in North America increased by 23% with the number of records compromised skyrocketing by 201%. Europe currently only had 49 reported data breaches (5% of all breaches), which is a 35% decline from the previous six months.

This is poised to change in 2018 when global data privacy regulations like the European General Data Protection Regulation (GDPR) and Australias Privacy Amendment (Notifiable Data Breaches) Act are enforced.
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.