A new report by the Atlas VPN team based on the “2020 Year End Data Breach QuickView Report by Risk Based Security”, the number of leaked data records worldwide hit a whopping 37 billion in 2020, whch was a 140% increase from 15 billion records in 2019.
The majority — 82% or over 30 billion of data records — were compromised in only 5 major breach incidents. All of them were a result of misconfigured databases or services, said the report.
The most commonly exposed type of data were names, leaked in 46% of data breaches last year. Following names are email addresses, which were compromised in 32% of incidents.
While leaked records reached never-before-seen highs in 2020, the number of actual data breaches shrank by 48%. It went down from 7,553 breaches in 2019 to 3,932 in 2020.
In total, 77% of data breaches last year were caused by outside actors, 16% by insider threats, while the rest is unknown. What is more, 676 breaches last year included ransomware as an attack element — a 100% rise compared to 2019.
You may click here to read the entire report.
