Articles about Data Breach

The popular game Animal Jam, enjoyed by millions of children around the world, has advised parents of a hack which has exposed the personal details of 46 million account records.

The company behind Animal Jam, WildWorks, has issued a warning that details revealed in the attack include 7 million email addresses used to create accounts, and 32 million player usernames. A proportion of the 46 million accounts affected have had full name and billing address details exposed.

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While companies are getting better at protecting their customers’ personal and sensitive information, their focus on security training has declined in the last year according to a new report.

The study from information security service Shred-it shows that 83 percent of consumers say they prefer to do business with companies who prioritize protecting their physical and digital data, so the decline in training risks losing custom as well as security breaches.

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Personal data management software specialist Dataguise is launching a new system that enables organizations to report the impact of a data breach faster and more accurately than ever before.

GDPR requires reporting of breaches within 72 hours of becoming aware, and notifying affected individuals without delay. Dataguise is able to extrapolate the number of unique data elements in a data set quickly, with greater than 90 percent accuracy, using a patent-pending approach based on neural network technologies.

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Although reports of data breaches are down 52 percent in the first half of this year, the number of records exposed over the same period has soared to 27 billion.

The latest Data Breach Report from Risk Based Security shows 2,037 publicly reported breaches from January to June, a 52 percent decrease compared to the first six months of 2019 and 19 percent below the same time period for 2018.

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Have I Been Pwned is unquestionably the best way to discover if your email address has been leaked in a data breach. The site can also check any passwords you use to see if they appear on the web and it can be fun entering some common choices to reveal how often they’ve been leaked. "Password", for example, has appeared in data breaches 3.7 million times, while "123456" crops up a whopping 23.5 million times.

The service is used in numerous third-party tools too, including Spybot Identity Monitor and 1Password. Have I Been Pwned is the work of Troy Hunt, and after failing to sell it earlier in the year, he has decided to take the step of opening source the code base in a quest for a more sustainable future.

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Companies with the worst privacy practices are 80 percent more likely to experience a data breach according to a new study.

Data privacy platform Osano used its evaluation framework to measure the privacy practices of the top 10,000 websites against 163 different factors to develop an Osano Privacy Score.

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An unprotected database belonging to the VPN service UFO VPN was exposed online for more than two weeks. Contained within the database were more than 20 million logs including user passwords stored in plain text.

User of both UFO VPN free and paid services are affected by the data breach which was discovered by the security research team at Comparitech. Despite the Hong Kong-based VPN provider claiming to have a "strict no-logs policy" and that any data collected is anonymized, Comparitech says that "based on the contents of the database, users' information does not appear to be anonymous at all".

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Twitter has emailed an unknown number of users to warn them of a security incident that took place some time prior to May 20 this year.

The company says that personal and billing information of people who used the Ads or Analytics pages on the Twitter site may have been affected. Twitter says that the vulnerability has now been addressed, but has emailed users to explain the circumstances of the incident.

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Cybercriminals exposed more than five billion records in 2019, costing over $1.2 trillion to US organizations. Added to the 2.8 billion records that were exposed in 2018, this means breaches over the last two years have cost US organizations over $1.8 trillion.

This is one of the findings of the latest Consumer Identity Breach Report from ForgeRock, which shows a dramatic increase in the number of breaches.

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A new survey finds that 79 percent of companies experienced at least one cloud data breach in the past 18 months, and close to half (43 percent) reported 10 or more breaches.

The study for cloud access risk security company Ermetic conducted by IDC  covered 300 CISOs and finds that security misconfiguration (67 percent), lack of adequate visibility into access settings and activities (64 percent) and identity and access management (IAM) permission errors (61 percent) are the top concerns associated with cloud production environments.

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According to a new survey, 79 percent of organizations have experienced an identity-related breach in the last two years, while 94 percent report having had one at some point.

The study from the The Identity Defined Security Alliance (IDSA), based on a survey of over 500 IT security and identity decision makers conducted by Dimensional Research, finds that 66 percent say phishing is the most common cause of identity-related breaches, while 99 percent believe their breaches were preventable.

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The total number of publicly reported breaches in Q1 2020 has decreased by 58 percent compared to the same period last year according to a new report from Risk Based Security.

Despite the number of breaches being down though, the number of records exposed for this quarter soared to 8.4 billion -- a 273 percent increase compared to Q1 2019, and a record for the same period since at least 2005, when detailed reporting began.

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Around 30 percent of employees who have been involved in the aftermath of a cyber incident have missed an important personal event. Some had to work overnight (32 percent) or suffered additional stress (33 percent), while 27 percent have had to cancel vacations.

A new report from Kaspersky highlights the human side of cybersecurity incidents by examining the discomfort and losses employees face following corporate breaches.

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Towards the end of 2018, Marriott International suffered a data breach of its Starwood Hotel reservation database. Now the hotel chain has revealed that it suffered a second data breach earlier this year.

The company says that at the end of February it noticed that an "unexpected amount of guest information" could have been accessed using the login credentials of two employees. It is thought that this access started in the middle of January, and up to 5.2 million customers have been affected.

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Companies are putting more resources into security technologies to detect and respond quickly to a data breach, but the number of breaches is still increasing according to a new report.

The latest annual corporate preparedness study from Experian, based on research carried out by the Ponemon Institute, shows 68 percent of respondents are putting more resources into security, with 57 percent also reporting that they believe their data breach response plans are 'very' or 'highly' effective, up from 49 percent in 2018.

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