HelpNetSecurity.com reported that “The number of records exposed has increased to a staggering 36 billion. There were 2,935 publicly reported breaches in the first three quarters of 2020, with the three months of Q3 adding an additional 8.3 billion records to what was already the “worst year on record,….”  The October 30, 2020 report entitled “Breaches down 51%, exposed records set new record with 36 billion so far” included these comments from Inga Goddijn (Executive VP at Risk Based Security):

The quagmire that formed in the breach landscape this Spring has continued through the third quarter of the year,…

Breach disclosures continue to be well below the high water mark established just last year despite other research indicating the number of attacks are on the rise.

How do we square these two competing views into the digital threat landscape?

We believe that the pivot by malicious actors to more lucrative ransomware attacks is another factor,...

While many of these attacks are now clearly breach events, the nature of the data compromised can give some victim organizations a reprieve from reporting the incident to regulators and the public.

After all, while the compromised data may be sensitive to the target organization, unless it contains a sufficient amount of personal data to trigger a notification obligation the event can go unreported.

Unfortunately no surprises in this report!

Originally Published By Foley & Lardner, November 2020

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