During the first half of 2017, 918 data breaches resulted in 1.9 billion data records being compromised globally.
Compared to the last month of 2016, the number of compromised records increased 164% during the first half of this year.
These numbers do not include last month’s Equifax and SEC breach announcements, or Yahoo’s revised report of its 2013 exposure.
Less than 1% of the compromised data was encrypted, which would have rendered the information useless to hackers.
“Malicious outsiders” were responsible for the most data breaches at 74%, an increase of 23%.
Identity theft was the leading “type” of data breaches, in number of incidents, accounting for 74% of all data breaches—an increase of 49% from the prior six months. The number of “identity theft incidents” that were hacked increased by 255%.
Most industries had more than a 100% increase in the amount of lost, stolen, or compromised records, and two-thirds of firms who suffered a breach also reported that their share prices were also negatively-impacted. North America suffered most of the breaches and compromised records, at above 86%.