In 2021 Approx. 6 Billion Accounts Are Being Affected By Data Breaches Reports Y 2022

In the year of 2021 throughout data breaches set a new record with 5.9 billion accounts affected by digital thieves, sources as accordance to a new report by a VPN (Virtual Private Network) provider.

A combination of several cyber smash-and-grab operations during a five-year span that contained 3.2 billion unique email and password combinations from Netflix, LinkedIn and other online outfits was the biggest breach of this period , reported AtlasVPN, which assembled its statistics from several of publicly-available sources.

Offered for Sale on the dark web for US$2 was the massive data lug , followings the report noted.

In line with large breaches identified in the report are as appended bellows:

In June 2021 Records of 700 million LinkedIn users were offered for sale on the hacker underground .User e-mail addresses, full names, phone numbers, physical addresses, geolocation records, genders, personal and professional experience, and many more were included on those leaked data. Later on LinkedIn noted that the data wasn’t obtained from an actual breach of its systems, but from “data scraping” of its internet-facing API.

In April 2021, information from 533 million users was scraped around 106 countries from Facebook in persuante published on a hacking forum. Those leaked information included phone numbers, full names, locations, email addresses, and users’ biographical information. Facebook advocacy was that the data leak is a result of an old vulnerability that was patched in the year 2019.

In January 2021, approx. 220 million Brazilians data was discovered on a dark web forum. Those data cache contained names, facial images, unique tax identifiers, addresses, phone numbers, email, salary, credit score, and more information.

Besides in January same year, a cloud misconfiguration — a common way data was exposed on the internet — by Chinese social media agency SocialArks, consequence 214 million Facebook users data was leaked with 400 GB of personal & confidential information, Instagram, and LinkedIn users. The data included names, contact information, country of residence, subscriber data, the position of work, and profile links.

“Paradoxically data breaches befitting a growing threat, it appears those high profile social media organizations are still not boost up enough effort about protecting the personal information of their users,” In news release Atlas VPN writer and researcher Ruta Cizinauskaite said.

She also observed “One of the very first things every social media organizations should must do is evaluate the amount of sensitive user data it collects — as the less sensitive data is stored, so the less the risk of it being leaked,”

Breaches Fatten Swiftly:

CEO of The Media Trust, Chris Olson, a website and mobile application security company in McLean, Va. bear in mind that data breaches have been increasing across every level of analysis since year 2020, from the feasibility of a breach, to the number of publicly reported breaches, to the number of exposed records.

He told TechNewsWorld “While all the data is not in yet,” , “some back of the envelope calculations suggest size has increased based on the number of records exposed divided by the number of breaches per year.”

Meanwhile he calculated that in year 2020, there were 1001 breaches and 155.8 million exposed records — an average of about 155,000 records per breach. In year 2021, he continued, there were 1291 breaches affecting 281.5 million records. That comes to about 218,000 records per breach — an increase of more than 70 percent.

in the year of 2021 breaches fatten continuously, quoted Lucas Budman, founder and CEO of TruU, a multifactor authentication company in Palo Alto, Calif. “We exceeded the number of breach events in year 2020 by the third quarter of year 2021,” he told TechNewsWorld.

He also added, a number of factors have been contributing to that increase. “The ever-increasing sophistication of threat actors, a greater number of connected IoT devices, and the protracted shortage of skilled security talent all play a role in increased breach activity,” he said.

Budman also addressed that Covid-19 has contributed to growing data breach numbers. “Data shows that the surge in remote and hybrid work and other factors resulting from the Covid-19 pandemic have fueled the rise of cybercrime by 600 percent or more,” he said.

Chart: AtlasVPN data breaches in 2021

Managing director of cybersecurity consulting at Breakwater Solutions, a risk mitigation, data management and analytics company in Austin, Texas. "Kevin Novak" explained that shifts from a predominantly captive workplace to a predominantly remote one, as a result of the pandemic, have been a driving force behind shifts in how attackers have pursued their targets.

“Since an exceedingly large percentage of attacks focus on the end-user, this move to remote has proven very fruitful for attackers,” he told TechNewsWorld.

“Similarly,” he continued, “the pandemic has dramatically changed the way goods and services are manufactured, dispatched and consumed. These changes acted as an unnatural tailwind that has driven enterprises to rapidly adopt a new digital persona.”

“The pace and newness of this adoption have created a more fertile and consolidated attack surface for attackers who will leverage enterprise misconfigurations until they’ve learned how to manage these new platform paradigms.”
“The scale, complexity, and cost of breaches increased dramatically in year 2021,” he added in his statement.
He added more “Though we certainly saw our share of low-hanging-fruit attacks, we also saw some of the most sophisticated and impactful breaches of all time,”.

Disturbing Development:

Kevin Dunne, president of Pathlock, a unified access orchestration provider in Flemington, N.J. explained that companies are becoming overwhelmed by the number of cyberattacks and data breaches they are facing, as cyberattackers get more courageous and exploit the increasing shift to cloud applications and infrastructure.

“For now, many of the attacks come without consequence, and the cost to prevent the attacks seems to outweigh the cost of a data breach,” he told TechNewsWorld.

“However,” he continued, “that dynamic is beginning to change, as ransomware attacks are beginning to cause multimillion-dollar disruptions to businesses.”

“Additionally, privacy regulations, such as GDPR and CCPA, are starting to result in government agencies handing out significant, multimillion-dollar fines for non-compliance,” he said.

While the number of breaches and stolen records is on the rise, there’s an even more disturbing trend in the data breach landscape. “The quality of information stolen is much higher,” observed Sanjay Raja, vice president of Gurucul, a threat intelligence company in El Segundo, Calif.

“It used to be about gathering as much personal information as possible, but more targeted attacks have seen intellectual property theft exceed that of personal data theft,” he told TechNewsWorld.

“In addition,” he continued, “as threat actors remain hidden in an environment longer — dwell time has gone up in recent years — they are able to probe and find higher quality data.”