Third-party risks are quickly mounting for enterprise organizations if the number of data breaches and total number of records exposed as a result are any indication.
In a recent analysis of data pertaining to security breaches in 2019, Risk Based Security uncovered a sharp increase in incidents involving companies handling sensitive data for business partners and other clients. The total number of such third-party breaches hit 368 in 2019, up from 328 in 2018 and 273 in 2017 — a 35% increase in two years.
In addition, the number of records exposed in these breaches skyrocketed 273% last year, from just over 1.7 billion in 2018 to 4.8 billion in 2019. On average, some 13 million records were exposed in each third-party breach in 2019, making it easily the worst year ever on record, according to the analysis. Data exposed in these breaches ran the gamut, including names, addresses, dates of birth, Social Security Numbers, credit card numbers, email addresses, and financial data.
Risk Based Security counted a total of 7,098 data breaches in 2019 — a relatively modest increase of 1% over 2018's 7,035 publicly disclosed data breaches. The breaches in total exposed a staggering 15.1 billion records, which included everything from relatively innocuous transaction logs to PII, financial data, and health records.
"The security landscape is just as challenging as ever," says Inga Goddijn, executive vice president at Risk Based Security. "Given the trend over the past few years now, expect the number of events to continue to grow while the number of records exposed will be driven in large part by the number of leaky databases and services uncovered."
Though the overall number of breaches increased only slightly year-over-year, the number of records exposed in 2019 was some 284% greater than in 2018. But that was largely due to four i ..
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