It’s tough to remember all of the data breaches that happened in 2018. But when you look at the largest and most impactful ones that were reported throughout the year, it paints a grim picture about the state of data security today.
The consequences of major companies leaking sensitive data are many. For consumers, it represents a loss of privacy, potential identity theft, and countless hours repairing the damage to devices. And it’s costly for companies, too, in the form of bad press and the resulting damage to their reputation, as well as time and money spent to remediate the breach and ensure customers’ data is well secured in the future.
But despite the well-known costs of data breaches, the problem of leaky data isn’t getting better. While there were a greater number of breaches in 2017, 2018 saw breaches on a more massive scale and from marquee players, such as Facebook, Under Armor, Quora, and Panera Bread. Cybercriminals stole sensitive personally identifiable information (PII) from users, including email and physical addresses, passwords, credit card numbers, phone numbers, travel itineraries, passport data, and more.
You’d think these problems would cause companies to be extra diligent about discovering data breaches, but that doesn’t seem to be case. In reality, companies rarely discover data breaches themselves. According to Risk Based Security, only 13 percent of data breaches are discovered internally.
To help people better understand the modern problem of data breaches, TruthFinder created this infographic. It clarifies the extent of the crisis using statistics from the Identity Theft Threat Center and Experian. Take a look at the infographic below to get sense of why 2018 was the year of the data breach tsunami.
