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According to a report released by IBM and Ponemon, the healthcare sector has the highest rates of security breaches and cyber attacks globally. The average cost of a data breach for healthcare organizations is around $10.1 million, while the global average for all industries sits around less than half of that amount, at about $4.35 million.

It would be big news, to say the least, if a large quantity of Google source code found its way into the public domain. Now imagine if the leak also included source code from Amazon and Uber. That’s the scale of the data leak that hit Russian tech giant Yandex. The risk here is that malicious actors could analyze the leaked code and discover exploitable security gaps.

Security teams need to continually bolster their cybersecurity controls and expertise to keep up with the evolving threat landscape. Successful readiness and response to a cybersecurity breach requires the right mix of people, processes and technology. Yet challenges with staffing, technical issues, and budget hamper threat detection and response for too many organizations, creating gaps that threat actors are eager to exploit.

Data breaches have become an unfortunate reality of the digital world we live in. While there is no doubt that efforts can be made to mitigate the chances of a data breach, living in a completely data breach-free world is not realistic. Apart from having processes and technology in place to prevent data breaches, companies should also have a plan of action in case they do suffer a breach. One aspect of being prepared is understanding how vulnerable your industry may be to data breaches.

The January 2022 International Committee of the Red Cross (ICRC) data breach was caused by an unpatched critical vulnerability in the Single Signe-In tool developed by Zoho, a business software development company. After exploiting the vulnerability (tracked as CVE-2021-40539), the cybercriminals deployed offensive security tools to help gain access to ICRC's contact database, resulting in the compromise of more than 515,000 globally.

Few companies expect to be at the center of a newsworthy data breach incident. However, according to some sources, cybercriminals can access 93% of businesses in an average of two days. Around 150 million data records were compromised in the third quarter of 2022 alone. Businesses are increasingly reliant on data systems such as cloud computing and remote working to compete in the modern workplace.

In 2022, cyber incidents in businesses and organizations worldwide have skyrocketed, with data breaches being one of the main concerns. Almost 109 million personal accounts and emails were compromised in Q3 2022 — a 70% increase compared to Q2. Particularly, Australia has seen a significant rise in data breaches, especially in its financial services and healthcare sectors.

Last week, T-Mobile disclosed that the personally identifiable information (PII) of 37 million of its past and present customers had been breached in an API attack. They also shared that the attack had been going on since November but was only caught January 5 by T-Mobile’s security team. Coverage of the attack has been swift, far-reaching, and harsh, as this represents T-Mobile’s 8th breach since 2018.