4.5 Billion Data Records Compromised

According to digital security company Gemalto's 2018 Breach Level Index Report, more than 4.5 billion data records were compromised in the first half of this year, a 133 percent increase over last year. That equals more than 25 million data records lost or stolen per day, one-million every hour, over 17,000 every minute, and 291 every second.

Not surprising is that the number one source of data breaches was "malicious outside actors," meaning external attackers. Those attacks encompassed more than 3.6 billion data records, or 80 percent of the total from the first half of 2018.

The second most frequent cause of compromised data was accidental, which dropped by 47 percent from over 1.6 billion records in the 2017 report to 879 million in 2018. Human mistakes still accounted for 318 out of the 945 total incidents reported this year. Next, 7 percent of data breaches were the result of malicious insiders stealing information from a company, and 2 percent of breaches were perpetrated by “hacktivists.”

Across industries, healthcare was hit the worst, with 27 percent of all data breaches. Most attacks were distributed across financial and educational institutions, government and professional organizations, and retail and industrial companies.       

The majority of data breaches had one overwhelming theme: identity theft accounted for 65 percent of breaches and over 3.9 billion of the compromised data records. Account access and financial access only made up 17 and 13 percent of breaches.

(Source: Rob Marvin, PC Mag, October 9, 2018)


Comments

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

EOQ Calculations in Excel

Image
Last week in Operations Management we used Excel to calculate the Economic Order Quantity and graph Carrying Costs, Ordering Costs, and Total Costs. The Economic Order Quantity or "EOQ" is the order size that "minimizes" Total Costs. Any more or less and you are spending too much on ordering or too much on keeping inventory. For example, in the Excel spreadsheet below, if you had an Annual Demand of 12000 units, Ordering Costs of $10 per order, and Holding costs of $4 per unit per year, the EOQ would be 245 units and Total Costs would be $980.00: We used the following formula in Excel to calculate EOQ: =SQRT((2*B2*B3)/B4) And the following formula to calculate Total Costs at this point: =$B$6/2*$B$4+$B$2/B6*$B$3 To create the graph, we used the following formulas and simply copied them over a range of 100 to 500 units. Ordering Costs: =$B$2/D2*$B$3 Holding Costs: =D2/2*$B$4 Total Costs: =F2+G2 Looking at this chart, we can clearly see that our order size of 245 is
Read more

Reliability Calculations in Excel

Image
In Operations Management today we used Excel to calculate product reliability. Reliability is defined as "the ability of a product, service, part, or system to perform its intended function under a prescribed set of circumstances" (Stevenson, 2009). In order to calulate reliability over a given length of time we need to use the following formula: P(no failure) = e -t/MTBF where: e = 2.7183 t = Length of service before failure MTBF = Mean Time Between Failures One of the cases we did in class involved an auto detailing company that wanted to calculate the reliability of its vacuum cleaners. Excel provides an "EXP" funtion that we can easily apply here. After entering all data for the problem as shown on the spreadsheet below, we type the formula =EXP(-A5/$B$2) in cell B5 and copy down. Next we plot the distribution for t=0 to the maximum life expectancy of 20 years using a line graph. What we end up with looks like a classic case of "ex
Read more

“How Are We Doing?” Efficiency, Utilization, and Productivity

Image
In business, knowing how we are performing in relation to our competition is vital. Internally we want to know if we are using resources effectively and getting the most out of what we have. Efficiency and Productivity are two calculations that are fundamental to the success of any organization. While the calculations are simple, choosing what measures to use and collecting the necessary data requires a thorough understanding of your industry. To calculate Efficiency you will have to first decide what to use as a base for comparison. Does your company already have a “target” of some kind? Like total units produced? If so then you can compare everything to that. Once you have that, there are a couple of basic formulas that can be used: Efficiency = Actual Output/Effective Capacity X 100% Utilization = Actual Output/Design Capacity X 100% Design Capacity is the maximum output achieved under ideal conditions. Effective Capacity is always less than Design Capacity because of factors
Read more