More than 10 million people were the victims of a single massive data breach, according to an Australian report, Notifiable Data Breaches Quarterly Statistics Report.
Key findings include:
- 215 notifications of data breaches from January 31, 2019 to March 31, 2019.
- 35 percent of those data breaches were due to human error.
- 61 percent of them were due to malicious attacks or criminal attacks. 66 percent involved cyber incidents such as phishing, malware or ransomware, brute-force attacks, compromised or stolen credentials. Theft of paperwork or data storage devices was another source of malicious or criminal attacks (14 percent). Other sources included actions taken by a rogue employee or insider threat (15 percent), as well as social engineering or impersonation (5 percent).
- 4 percent of the data breaches were due to system failures.
The kind of personal information divulged by number of notifications of data breaches:
- Contact information - 186
- Financial details - 98
- Identity information - 55
- Health information - 63
- TFN - 36
- Other sensitive information - 25
The top five sectors with data breaches notifications (by number of notifications) include:
- Healthcare - 58
- Finance - 27
- Legal, accounting and management services -23
- Education - 19
- Retail - 11
