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The digital security expert Gemalto has presented his Breach Level Report for 2016. The Breach Level Index (BLI) contained therein shows an increase of 86 percent of the cyber attacks compared to the previous year. The BLI is a worldwide database for data protection violations. The attacks are distinguished by the number of affected records, the data type, the origin of the attack, the use of the captured data, and the encryption status thereof.
As part of the Breach Level Report, Gemalto 2013 compared the first publicly disclosed data breaches. Since then about 7 billion data record disclosures have been documented. The biggest coup was made by cyber criminals in 2016 with the capture of 400 million records. These were email addresses, IP addresses, logins, and passwords from users of the Adult FriendFinder site. Gemalto graded this attack with the highest possible severity of 10.
The majority of the attacks were concentrated on identity theft
59 percent of all data breaches committed in 2016 are due to identity theft. The second most frequent hit was the financial sector. 330 attacks in this area are documented for 2016. This is a slight decline compared to 2015. Here there were 413 attacks. Despite the decline, the cybercriminals succeeded in accessing more data sets. In 2015, 4.1 million records were stolen, in 2016 even 5.4 million.
Most affected by such attacks is North America with 1,443 (80 percent), Europe hit 161 161 attacks (9 percent), closely followed by Asia with 145 (8 percent). 2 percent of cyber attacks were launched in Africa and the Middle East. There were 38 attacks. In South America were 7 attacks (about 1 percent).
