[BreachExchange] Third-Party Breaches — and the Number of Records Exposed — Increased Sharply in 2019

[Destry Winant]

https://www.darkreading.com/attacks-breaches/third-party-breaches---and-the-number-of-records-exposed---increased-sharply-in-2019/d/d-id/1337037

Each breach exposed an average of 13 million records, Risk Based Security found.

Third-party risks are quickly mounting for enterprise organizations if
the number of data breaches and total number of records exposed as a
result are any indication.

In a recent analysis of data pertaining to security breaches in 2019,
Risk Based Security uncovered a sharp increase in incidents involving
companies handling sensitive data for business partners and other
clients. The total number of such third-party breaches hit 368 in
2019, up from 328 in 2018 and 273 in 2017 — a 35% increase in two
years.

In addition, the number of records exposed in these breaches
skyrocketed 273% last year, from just over 1.7 billion in 2018 to 4.8
billion in 2019. On average, some 13 million records were exposed in
each third-party breach in 2019, making it easily the worst year ever
on record, according to the analysis. Data exposed in these breaches
ran the gamut, including names, addresses, dates of birth, Social
Security Numbers, credit card numbers, email addresses, and financial
data.

Risk Based Security counted a total of 7,098 data breaches in 2019 — a
relatively modest increase of 1% over 2018's 7,035 publicly disclosed
data breaches. The breaches in total exposed a staggering 15.1 billion
records, which included everything from relatively innocuous
transaction logs to PII, financial data, and health records.

"The security landscape is just as challenging as ever," says Inga
Goddijn, executive vice president at Risk Based Security. "Given the
trend over the past few years now, expect the number of events to
continue to grow while the number of records exposed will be driven in
large part by the number of leaky databases and services uncovered."

Though the overall number of breaches increased only slightly
year-over-year, the number of records exposed in 2019 was some 284%
greater than in 2018. But that was largely due to four incidents that
alone accounted for some 8.5 billion of the 15.1 billion records in
total that were exposed.

Risk Based Security identified the four breaches as involving smart
home product company Orvibo; Chinese e-commerce merchant
LightInTheBox; email marketing company Verifications.io; and an
unknown company managing data for data aggregators including Oxydata
and People Data Labs.

All four breaches resulted from data being put into open,
misconfigured databases that were then made publicly accessible over
the Internet to anyone. Excluding these data breaches, the total
number of records exposed last year would still have been higher than
the number in 2018, but by a relatively small 1.3 billion records.

Karen Bruner, technical evangelist at container security firm
StackRox, says the increase in breaches involving cloud databases and
services is the result of poor security hygiene. "All the major cloud
providers offer the controls needed to keep the data in their cloud
buckets private, but customers need to use them," Bruner says.

Inexperienced cloud users will sometimes remove all protections when
they have trouble accessing the data from applications. That
inexperience often goes hand-in-hand with not doing best practices,
like scanning their cloud infrastructure for security
misconfigurations, she says. "And when security is set up correctly
initially, it takes just one customer change to wipe it out and make
the bucket contents public," Bruner adds.

Web Breaches Exposed Most Records
As in previous years, breaches involving external hackers, malicious
insiders, and from accidents and negligence outnumbered breaches
stemming from other causes. However, Web breaches caused by
misconfigured services and failure to follow basic hardening practices
resulted in a far greater number of exposed records. For instance,
though nearly 5,200 data breaches resulted from hacking, they exposed
only about 1.5 billion records as compared to nearly 13.6 billion
records from a mere 343 Web breaches.

Sam Rubin, vice president at incident response and risk management
firm Crypsis Group, says the Risk Based Security report highlights the
challenges posed by the growing complexity and attack surface of
modern IT environments.

"The cloud is highly enabling, yet with so many cloud providers in the
typical enterprise mix, most IT teams have multiple shared
responsibility models to manage," he says.