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TopCurrent State Of Data Breaches
In the past few years large volumes of records have been leaked due to data breaches. Detailed data is available at www.breachlevelindex.com. Since the web service started tracking data breaches in 2013, approximately nine billion records have been leaked worldwide. The data has been filtered to exclude the United Stated and excluded data breaches where the data breach only consisted of publicly available data. Data breaches from the Unites states dwarf that of other countries, as is shown in Figure 2. According to the Breach Level Index report (2017) approximately 52 percent of breaches that were reported have no data on the amount of records leaked. The web service only reports on publicised data breaches, any non-disclosed or unknown/unconfirmed breaches have been omitted. Of the reported breaches, only 4 percent of the stolen records had been encrypted and unusable by the perpetrator of the breach.
In the following figures, we demonstrate the current state of data breaches. In Figure 1, the Technology and Entertainment industries are significant more impacted by data breaches than the other sections. This represent the strong presence of technology and entertainment in the United States compared to the rest of the world. In Figure 2 we show that the Unites States alone has the same of even more data breaches that the rest of the world combined. Thus, we concentrate on the rest of the world data breaches in this paper since the Unites States significantly skew results into their unique environment.
In Figure 3, surprisingly three Asian countries have the most data breaches: China, South Korea and Turkey. The sectors of the breaches do not form a pattern, except retail that dwarfs all other breaches in China. Although the Government related breaches do figure highly in Turkey, Mexico and India. This could present the challenges that emerging counties have in their government sectors in securing data due to skill or other shortages.