Over 500 million digital identities exposed within a year

Symantec said the number of crypto-based ransomware attacks increased by 35%, while fake technical support scams surged 200%. The annual threat report revealed that cybercriminals have improved their abilities in creating unknown software bugs to ensure their attacks work properly, with groups of hackers becoming more professional and working in ways that resemble that of actual software companies.

Ransomware restricts access to the infected computer system in some way, requesting that the user pay a ransom to the malware operators to remove the restriction.

The largest number of breaches took place within the Health Services sub-sector, which comprised 39 of all breaches in the year. There was also a surge in the number of big companies suffering large-scale attacks in 2015. There were 9 data breaches in 2015 that exposed more than 10 million records, up from four breaches of the same severity in 2014.

Kevin Haley, director of Symantec, said the total reported number of exposed identities jumped 23% to 429 million. In 2015, many companies chose not to reveal the full extent of the breaches they experienced. A conservative estimate by Symantec of those unreported breaches pushes the real number of records lost to more than half a billion.