Security News > 2022 > January > Exposed records exceeded 40 billion in 2021

According to a research by Tenable, at least 40,417,167,937 records were exposed worldwide in 2021, calculated by the analysis of 1,825 breach data incidents publicly disclosed between November 2020 and October 2021.

This is a considerable increase on the same period in 2020, which saw 730 publicly disclosed events with just over 22 billion records exposed.

Analysis of the events for this report found that many are readily mitigated by patching legacy vulnerabilities and addressing misconfigurations to help limit attack paths.

"Modern security leaders and practitioners must think more holistically about the attack paths that exist within their networks and how they can efficiently disrupt them. By examining threat actor behavior we can understand which attack paths are the most fruitful and leverage these insights to define an effective security strategy."

Staying on top of patching assets is difficult enough given the sheer volume of disclosed vulnerabilities, but in 2021 it was even more challenging due to incomplete patches, miscommunications from vendors and patch bypasses.

In 2021, there were 21,957 common vulnerabilities and exposures reported, representing a 19.6% increase over the 18,358 reported in 2020 and a 241% increase over the 6,447 disclosed in 2016.

News URL

https://www.helpnetsecurity.com/2022/01/21/exposed-records-2021/