Majority of leaked records in 2019 came from financial services firms

According to a new report, more than 60 percent of all leaked records in 2019 were exposed by financial services organizations, despite only six percent of breaches affecting these organizations.

The 2019 Financial Breach Report from Bitglass says these figures are at least partially due to the Capital One breach, which compromised more than 100 million records.

The top three breaches of financial services firms in 2019 were suffered by Capital One Financial Corporation (106 million individuals), Centerstone Insurance and Financial Services (111,589), and Nassau Educators Federal Credit Union (86,773).

"Given that organizations in the financial services industry are entrusted with highly valuable, personally identifiable information (PII), they represent an attractive target for cybercriminals," says Anurag Kahol, CTO of Bitglass. "Hacking and malware are leading the charge against financial services and the costs associated with breaches are growing. Financial services organizations must get a handle on data breaches and adopt a proactive security strategy if they are to properly protect data from an evolving variety of threats."

Hacking and malware remain the primary cause of data breaches in financial services at 74.5 percent (up slightly from 73.5 percent in 2018). Insider threats are up too, from 2.9 percent in 2018 to 5.5 percent today, while accidental disclosures increased from 14.7 percent to 18.2 percent.

The average cost of each breached record in financial services ($210) has increased over the last few years and exceeds the per-breached-record cost of all other industries except healthcare ($429).

For large scale breaches, which affect approximately 100M or more individuals, the cost per breached record in financial services is now $388 – up from $350 in 2018.

Yet despite these statistics it seems many financial services organizations are still not taking proper steps to secure data in modern cloud and BYOD environments. Consequently, they are suffering from recurring breaches. For example, Capital One and Discover each experienced their fourth significant data breach in 2019.

You can find out more and get the full report on the Bitglass blog.

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