Gemalto the digital security services company and Safenet have released a report titled “2014 – Year of Mega Breaches & Identity Theft”
The headline numbers make for sober reading. The number of data records loss jumped 78%, from about 575 million in 2013 to more than one billion in 2014.
In terms of time, in 2014 some 2,803,036 data records were lost every day, 116,793 every hour, 1,947 every minute and 32 every second. So figure in about the time it took to read the previous sentence, about 400 data records would have been stolen or lost based on the 2014 data breach statistics.
Despite the widespread availability of commercially and indeed open source encryption solutions as a means for protecting information and privacy, only 58 of the data breach incidents in 2014, or less than 4% of the total, involved data that was encrypted in part or in full.
In short, companies and organisations are still not taking protection of data seriously. It’s likely to take the commensurate loss of revenue or regulatory fines, up to and including gaol time for things to start improving.
One catalyst for this may well be the EU General Data Protection Regulations, but there’s a lot of lobbying and compromises between the proposals and actual legislation. It may still revert back to being an EU Directive. Meanwhile our Personal Information is being shared, sold and aggregated ad infinitum, that’s before it’s leaked and stolen !