New data from the Identity Theft Resource Center (ITRC) covering the first half of this year shows a significant rise in the number of successful cyber attacks focused on stealing corporate data.
The ITRC’s H1 Data Breach Analysis report not only sounds the alarm with a surprising number of compromises this year, but also analyzes the data. According to the report:
- The number of compromises in H1 of this year was 1393. For context, there were 1802 compromises in ALL of 2022!
- A lot of the increase happened in Q2 of this year, experiencing 951 incidents – around double any other Q2 on record
- Financial services and healthcare continue to be leading target industries
- Of those incidents whose attack type was specified, phishing continues to dominate, this year nearly double that of ransomware (which places second)
The report also provides plenty of data on the number of records compromised, but that data feels less important, as – in some cases – the sheer number of records may simply be luck rather than a concerted effort to attain access to a specific number of records.
Regardless of the amount of data, the fact that phishing and ransomware continue to be the leading types of attacks, it remains clear that organizations need to begin (or continue) to establish a culture of security within its employees – something that includes security awareness training – to stop attacks that initially include social engineering, phishing, and impersonation.
