Did you know Recent reports state that the data breaches over the Unites States have declined to about 19% in 2020

Data breaching is the leak of private and confidential information. This can happen both intentionally as well as unintentionally. This includes data leak, information release and also disclosure of private information. In 2019, the amount of data breaches in the United States resulted to about 1,473 with 164.68 million confidential information leaked. During the first six months of 2020, only 540 data breaching reports were submitted. Total data breaches and unintended leak of information incidents was reported to decline by 19% in 2020. As mentioned above, in 2019, 1473 incidents were reported but that number decreased to 1108 in 2020. This data was collected by an organization that provides help to the US to identify theft victims; this non-profit organization is called the Identity Theft Resource Center (ITRC), which is based in California.

Huge companies like Microsoft, Facebook and many more were also included with having the most significant amount of breaches in the year 2020.

ITRC’s president and CEO Eva Velasquez says that even though it is very encouraging to see the number of these data breaches decrease, it should also be known that this problem is not going away. Cybercriminals are just finding another way to continue with their tricks to attack businesses and consumers. She also said that along with all these efforts it is also important to increase their resources and prevent these to happen by planning every step one-ahead of these criminals.

Reports issued by the ITRC state that out of the 878 data breaches of 2020, 44% was phishing, 18% ransom ware, 12% another type of malware and 6% of an unsecured cloud environment. Human error was also listed as the cause of at least one third of the breaching.

‘Phishing’, which is a social engineering attack used to obtain user data including credit card numbers and ‘Ransom ware’ is the type of attack that mostly focuses individually. These two attacks are the most common at the moment and also require very little background work to break into a system that is they only need login id and password. James E Lee, the COO of ITRC says that these results are a lot better than the ones obtained in 2017. He also said that this huge difference in amount also came in with the fact that attackers now prioritize quality over quantity. He says that the attackers nowadays don’t need huge amount of background work to break into something. Their methods at the moment have become highly organized and clever.