Over 700 million data records were compromised last year thanks to 1,673 data breaches, according to digital security firm Gemalto.
The vendor tracks publicly available global breach data and ranks incidents according to their impact to compile its
Breach Level Index.
In 2015, 22 records were lost every second, yet in only 4% of total cases strong encryption was used to render that stolen data useless to the attacker.
The majority of incidents (53%) were related to identity theft rather than financial access (22%) or account access (11%).
This is a shift away from a pattern of previous years, when credit card and other financial data was the main target for cybercriminals, according to Gemalto data protection CTO, Jason Hart.
He argued that it’s hard to remediate attacks compromising personal data.
