More Than 340 Million User Accounts Breached So Far This Year

Uploaded on 2023-06-09 in NEWS-News Analysis, FREE TO VIEW

Exclusive new research shows that over 340 million people have been affected by business data breaches already in the first four months of 2023. The biggest breach that happened this year so far was at Twitter around the time of Elon Musk's takeover which impacted 235 million user accounts.

These figures come from a new Company Data Breach Tracker launched by by the Independent Advisor who produce a regularly updated, month by month timeline of the latest company data breaches and hacks happening in 2023.

Providing an overview of the impact data breaches have on businesses and their customers, here are the key overall insights of company data breaches in 2023:

Number of people affected in 2023: 346,758,345

2023’s biggest breach: Twitter with allegedly 235 million emails leaked

·UK’s biggest breach: 10 million JD Sports customers exposed

US’s biggest breach: T-mobile with 37 million customers affected

Data leaks caused by threat actors: 275,630,000

Number of potential records compromised in:

January: 288,082,463
February: 25,342,580
March: 31,413,302
April: 1,920,000

Staying secure online is a huge concern for companies in 2023. More and more fall victim to cyber attacks, phishing and ransomware leading to data leaks, huge payouts and often lawsuits.

Tracking the key details of these corporate attacks, the guide breaks each down by date, company, company info, attack type, and the amount of accounts affected. The three largest company breaches of 2023 so far were:

Company: Twitter
Attack type: Data leak (threat actor)
Affected: 235 million
Description: The largest attack of 2023 so far was on social media platform Twitter at the very start of the year. 235 million Twitter users and their associated email addresses were leaked to an online hacking forum, selling for around 2$.

Company: T-Mobile
Attack type: Bad actor, hack
Affected/data leaked: 37 million
Description: The next largest was on mobile telecom company T-Mobile, with the hacker gaining access to customer data from 37 million accounts, including names, birth dates, and phone numbers

Company: TruthFinder and Instant Checkmate
Attack type: Cyber attack
Affected: 20.22 million
Description: The third was PeopleConnect-owned background check services TruthFinder and Instant Checkmate. Hackers leaked a 2019 backup database containing information of 20.22 million users including their PII, encrypted passwords and expired or inactive password reset tokens.

The causes of the breaches have also been highlighted with threat actors accounting for 289,700,000. The next largest cause is hacking at 32,303,580, followed by third party data exposure at 11,354,000, and then human error at 382,466.

With an estimated 8,000 cyber attacks per year, the ability of Internet users to stay safe online simply can’t be taken for granted and as cyber criminals grow more skillful, almost anyone can become a victim. While not all cases of a data breach lead to fraud or identity theft, compromised data is an expensive business for companies and the repercussions stretch further to impact consumer trust and brand reputation, in addition to economic loss.

With hackers now using cutting edge AI-powered tools for increasingly sophisticated attacks, cyber security teams are having to work doubly hard to keep pace with cyber criminals. The need for adequate staff training as well as creating awareness and the trust to report any issues has never been greater.

Advice for businesses on how to protect their data against these types of attack include the following basis measures:-

Training of staff to help recognise phishing emails and malicious activity.

Generating trust with employees , so that should someone realise they opened a file or clicked a link by mistake, they will be comfortable reporting the incident without fear of being blamed.

Setting up secure VPNs across all devices (laptop, mobile, tablet,) for users in all locations.

Turning on Two Factor Authentication (2FA) to verify identity

Regularly updating passwords.

Data is often stolen by hackers when they succeed in gaining unauthorised online network access. Phishing is the most common form of attack when a seemingly innocuous email is sent to victims containing links that may install ransomware or allow a bad actor access to systems. Phishing can also be used to lure people into entering personal information, leading to data theft or fraud.

Threat actors are slightly different from hackers in that they may not necessarily have technical skills to hack a system but will exploit a vulnerable server, eventually leading to a data breach or another other type of cybercrime. Other factors that commonly lead to a data breach include malware, damaging software that infects devices with viruses, ransomware and spyware. which can then corrupt files and compromise data.

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