This year has been a scary year when it comes to cyber-attacks. Almost 9 billion records were compromised so far, and I would not be surprised if there were more. When it comes to these data breaches it is not a question of “if”, but of when.
Looking back, there have been two notable incidents:
- In August 2014, hackers in China compromised 220 million records by targeting website registrations from online games, apps, and movies. This impacted 20 million records
- In May, eBay was compromised by the attackers hacking staff credentials and accessing the user database. This breach impacted 145 million people by having their personal information exposed.
With these 2 incidents alone, close to 400 million records were exposed. This figure doesn’t count the other major data breaches at Home Depot, JPMorgan Chase, Michaels, Neiman Marcus, Orange, American Express, or Community Health Systems.
This year of cyberwar has hopefully taught organizations a valuable lesson when it comes to implementing a full scale data protection policy. If not sooner or later the consumer might start evaluating a company’s security posture before choosing to use a service.
