In the last four years, the average number of government data records compromised per breach increased by more than 400%. This upward trend demonstrates how the impact of any single attack is growing, and it reflects a grim reality in the cyber world — cybercrime is transitioning from targets of opportunity to focused targets of choice. The shift is bad news for government agencies.

For cybercriminals and hacker groups, government institutions are often lucrative victims, which means they’re also larger targets. More than 822 government organizations suffered from data breach incidents in the last eight years; a total of 174 million records were leaked, with a total financial impact of $26 billion.