In the year 2016, there were 4,149 data breaches reported. The number broke the previous all-time high of about 1 billion exposed records in 2013.
The research came from 2016 Data Breach QuickView report released in January 25th by Risk Based Security (RBS).
"While the number of data breaches actually remained relatively flat from last year, the big story coming out of 2016 is obviously the massive increase in the number of records exposed," said RBS executive vice president Inga Goddijn in a statement.
They discovered that businesses accounted for 51 percent of the reported breaches, surpassing unknown (23.4 percent), government (11.7 percent), medical (9.2 percent), and education (4.7 percent) industries. 80.9 percent exposed records also came from the business sector.
In 2016, there were 94 reported incidents that each have exposed at least one million records. 37 incidents exposed ten millions or more records. If compared to 2015, this is an increase of 63 percent and 105 percent respectively.
At the top of the list, nine of the data breaches exposed of a combined of three billion records. Breaches at FriendFinder Networks, Myspace and Yahoo! accounted for over 2.2 billion of the compromised records.
52 percent of breaches were the result of hacking, mostly caused by SQL injection. 18.3 percent of data breaches were the result of insider activity, and just 1.6 percent of breaches were caused by stolen devices.
RBS's research was further supported by the Online Trust Alliance (OTA) which in its 2017 Cyber Incident & Breach Response Guide, concluded that there were about 82,000 cyber incidents in 2016, affecting 225 organizations around the world per day.
However, since many data breaches weren't reported, OTA believes that the number can exceed 250,000.
Among the 2016 data breaches, the U.S. and the UK accounted to more than half of all global breaches. 52 percent of the attacks compromised sensitive information such as Social Security Numbers.
Hackers appear to be getting better with sophisticated methods of attacks and more precision, said OTA in its report. "They're targeting specific companies and industry sectors and not just for consumer data, but for business data, data regarding acquisition and mergers, data that may also harm a company's reputation."
