Recent research by Imperva found out that a total of 878.17 million data records worldwide were compromised in January 2021.
Indeed, it was reported that the numbers of data breaches are continuing to grow rapidly, reaching unseen volumes of comprised data. The study showed that year-over-year, there will be around three times more records stolen annually.
It was also predicted that 2021 will witness around 1,500 breach incidents with a total of 40 billion compromised records and an average of 26 million compromised records per breach. With more businesses migrating to the cloud and the impact of the pandemic, the systems are more vulnerable than ever, which results in an increase in the amount of stolen data.
The report noted that the most frequently stolen type of data was personally identifiable information (PII), which includes personal data such as names, gender, age, location, health, religion, and sexual orientation. The other types of stolen data were password and credential data, as well as credit card information.
It was recommended that organizations focus more on the security of their systems in order to protect better their customers’ data.