While more than 2 billion records known to be breached in Europe feels like a lot – it’s certainly a big start to the year – the figure is dwarfed by this month’s global numbers. However, the global figures have been significantly skewed by a big outlier event: the mother of all [...]
While more than 2 billion records known to be breached in Europe feels like a lot – it’s certainly a big start to the year – the figure is dwarfed by this month’s global numbers.
However, the global figures have been significantly skewed by a big outlier event: the mother of all breaches, or MOAB. This 26-billion record exposure is probably the largest data leak to date, involving the data of 3,876 organisations – including Europe-based ones.
Because a lot of this data is compiled from old breaches, we didn’t feel it right to log this event as individual organisations – instead, we treated it like any other COMB (compilation of many breaches), and grouped the data. This means that the geographic location of this incident was logged as ‘multiple’, and as such, has been excluded from this European analysis.
When you exclude the MOAB from the global total, you’re left with ‘only’ 3,530,829,011 records known to be breached. This means that Europe’s 2,111,560,354 records are a significant proportion of the global total, when only considering ‘regular’ incidents. As a result, all remaining incidents in this report truly are new ones, first coming into the public domain in January 2024.
Europe had its own outlier event this month: a cyber attack on the Russian research centre Planeta, which allegedly wiped 2 PB (petabytes) of data. Source:www.itgovernance.eu
