The year 2019 is shaping up to be a landmark one for data breaches, as it has seen over 3,800 breaches—a 50% or greater increase over the last four years, according to a report published by Risk Based Security on Wednesday.
Despite concerns raised in the cybersecurity community about insider threats, 89% of breaches are the result of outside attacks, though the report notes that “more and more sensitive data is exposed when insiders fail to properly handle or secure the information,” pointing to misconfigured databases and services representing 149 of 3,813 incidences reported so far this year resulting in the exposure of over 3.2 billion records.
Healthcare services are the single highest affected industry, according to Risk Based Security, with Retail, Finance/Insurance, Public Administration, and IT rounding out the top five.