[BreachExchange] Over 1, 900 breaches reported in the first three months of 2019, a new Q1 record

[Destry Winant]

https://www.riskbasedsecurity.com/2019/05/over-1900-breaches-reported-in-the-first-three-months-of-2019-a-new-q1-record/

RICHMOND, VA, May 7, 2019 — Risk Based Security today announced the release
of its Q1 2019 Data Breach QuickView Report, which found that there were
1,903 publicly disclosed data compromise events in the first three months
of the year, exposing over 1.9 billion records. No other first quarter has
seen this level of activity, putting 2019 on pace to be yet another “worst
year on record” for the number of publicly reported breaches.

“The number of data leaks – both in the form of open, unsecured services
and credentials leaks – reached new levels this quarter,” commented Inga
Goddijn, executive vice president and head of Cyber Risk Analytics.
“Researchers are increasingly going public when they discover sizable,
unprotected databases containing sensitive information and unfortunately,
they aren’t terribly difficult to find when you know where to look.” The
report finds that 67.6% of records compromised in Q1 were due to exposure
of sensitive data on the Internet.

A particular area of interest for the research team is breach event
timelines. Throughout 2018, the QuickView Reports focused on analysis of
the time interval between the date an incident is first discovered by the
breached organization, to the date the incident is first publicly
disclosed. Initial research indicated the gap between discovery and
disclosure incrementally shrank from 2014 though the first quarter of 2018,
but stalled for the remainder of the year.

This lack of improvement prompted a new focus for 2019: digging deeper into
the factors that may be influencing why some organizations are quicker to
disclose a breach than others. This quarter, analysis focused on whether
there is a correlation between discovery method and time to disclose. The
theory being, organizations that are better able to detect a breach will
also be better positioned to respond swiftly.

In an interesting twist, the data did indeed show there is a correlation
between discovery method and time to disclose, but it was not the expected
outcome. In Q1 2019, organizations that were alerted to the event from
external sources – such as law enforcement, researcher or customer
reporting, fraud monitoring or actor disclosure – were on average 31 days
quicker to publicly disclose the event than organizations that learned of
the incident through internal sources.

“Clearly our hypothesis, that organizations finding their own breaches will
report them faster, was dead wrong this quarter,” commented Ms. Goddijn.
“We will be following this metric closely throughout the year. For now,
it’s too early to say whether the result we found for this quarter is an
outlier or a fairly typical outcome.”

About the Data Breach QuickView Report

The Data Breach Quickview Report is made possible through the research
conducted by Risk Based Security and Cyber Risk Analytics. It is designed
to provide an executive level summary of the key findings from RBS’
analysis of breach activity disclosed in the first quarter of 2019. Contact
Risk Based Security for any focused analysis of the breaches of specific
interest to your organization.

Get your copy of the Q1 2019 Data Breach QuickView Report
<https://pages.riskbasedsecurity.com/2019-q1-breach-quickview-report>
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