More than 3,800 data breaches occurred in the first half of this year, a 54 percent increase from the first half of 2018. The number of consumer records compromised in data breaches increased 52 percent over this time, with 4.1 billion records compromised in the first half of 2019 and 3.2 billion of those coming from just eight breaches.
With the continually growing supply of payment cards and identity information available to fraudsters on the dark web, it’s hard to expect fraud activity to slow down anytime soon. The 2019 MidYear QuickView Data Breach Report from Risk Based Security found that both the number data breaches and compromised records are on pace to increase by more than 50 percent this year. This comes as the Identity Theft Resource Center tallied the most records compromised in 2018 and highest number of data breaches in 2017 in more than a decade.
Data breaches vary in damage but all stolen data can be leveraged somehow for identity fraud. The MidYear Data Breach Report found that email addresses and passwords were the most likely to be compromised in data breaches, as they were exposed in 70 and 65 percent of the first half 2019 breaches, respectively. Payment card numbers and Social Security numbers were compromised in 11 percent of the data breaches in the first half of 2019.
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