A new ForgeRock study shows that a whopping 2.8 billion consumer data records where compromised by criminals last year. US companies incurred costs totaling $654 billion as a result of data breaches. In Q1 of this year, data breaches in the financial services industry accounted for $6.2 billion in damages alone, a dramatic increase from the $8 million figure for Q1 of 2018.
Nearly all breaches (97%) involved the exposure of personally identifiable information (PII) data, and the most common method of exposures were unauthorized access (34%), ransomware/malware (17.3%) and misconfigurations (16%). Cybercriminals mainly went after organizations in healthcare, finance and government.
Read more: 2018 in numbers: Data breaches cost $654 billion, expose 2.8 billion data records in the U.S.
