The Risk Based Security research facility has been routinely publishing reports outlining various data breaches during the year. This report is based on the disclosed breaches that companies have announced which this company then releases periodically.

One of the most recent reports is the 2019 MidYear QuickView Data Breach Report, which issued some pretty frightening numbers and details. To put it into perspective, the report announced that in the first six months of 2019, there have been over 3,800 publicly disclosed breaches. This totalled the number of compromised records to total roughly 4.1 billion.

That’s way over half of the world population at the time of this recording.

But what’s actually shocking about this is that a large chunk - about 3.2 billion - of those compromised records stemmed from eight of those breaches.

The report also summarized that 70% of the breaches exposed emails and 65% of the breaches exposed passwords. Crucial information, but not as severe as addresses, social insurance or security numbers, or credit card numbers.

Looking at the report further there’s some things to keep in mind. While you may be hung up about the fact that so much information was exposed from eight breaches alone, it’s key we pay attention to the bigger picture.

The report mentioned that the vast majority of breaches were moderate to low severity, meaning they exposed 10,000 records or less.

This is key to know because many business today assume that if they’re small, people wouldn’t bother them. The truth is that according to data, small businesses are being targeted a lot. After all, most don’t have tight security measures compared to larger companies.

Today, the average cyber-criminal is lazy and will do anything to gather small bits of information. And it’s effortless to get it from systems that aren’t as robust.

Overall the report outlines the importance of small businesses stepping up their security of customer information. The business sector alone accounts for 67% of all reported breaches and 84.6% of the exposed records.

It doesn’t take a genius to figure that out and consumers should be pushing any small business owner to have a more robust system. And even if customers aren’t, business owners should take the initiative to have a good security system.

Best of all, it doesn’t have to be anything highly complex. The report noted that misconfigured databases was a big cause. Out of the 3,813 breaches, 149 of them were from misconfigured databases. While that’s small, the report noted that amongst those breaches, 3.2 billion records were exposed.

So making a point that your systems runs smoothly ought to be a top priority for businesses.

Another step is ensuring people are more aware of security and get proper training. The report found that these problems that are coming up are nothing new. Quarter after quarter, year after year, the same mistakes are being made.

Since January 2018, the top causes of breaches have been unauthorized access to systems, skimmers, and exposure of sensitive information have been the ongoing themes of breaches,

All too often, businesses focus on the external threats while people fail to send the proper emails to the right people or aren’t simply aware of what can pose a threat. Having training in place to address a lot of these common issues can ensure there will be less breaches in the future.