Security News > 2021 > January > 2020 sees huge increase in records exposed in data breaches
The number of breaches may have fallen, but the number of exposed records hit a high not seen since 2005, says Risk Based Security.
The volume of publicly disclosed data breaches fell by 48% in 2020 compared with the previous year, leading to 3,932 in total.
The number of confirmed ransomware attacks that resulted in data breaches doubled to 676 last year from 337 in 2019, according to RSB. "The rise of ransomware coupled with the particularly pernicious practice of leaking data stolen during the attack has been a leading theme of the year," Goddijn said.
Despite the high number of exposed records and the severity of last year's data breaches, the problem may not be widespread as it appears.
Among all the exposed records analyzed for 2020 by RSB, 30.4 billion, or 82%, came from just five data breaches.
"So while striving for zero data breaches is an admirable goal, it's likely an unattainable one. Rather, focusing on resiliency and having a well-developed incident response plan can go a long way toward reducing the negative impact of a breach."