Revenue-Seeking Cyber Criminals Increasingly Target Businesses Over Individuals By Sarah Skidmore Sell | February 2, 2021
Cyber criminals shifted away from stealing individual consumers’ information in 2020 to focus on bigger, more profitable attacks on businesses, according to a report from the Identity Theft Resource Center.
The nonprofit, which supports victims of identity crime, found that the number of U.S. data breaches fell 19% in 2020 to 1,108. But the number of individual victims of such cyber crimes fell 66% compared with the year prior.
Ransomware and phishing attacks are now the preferred form of data theft because they require less effort and generate bigger payouts. The ITRC said that one ransomware attack can generate as much revenue in minutes as hundreds of individual identity theft attempts over months or years.
Better Identity Coalition, FIDO Alliance and the Identity Theft Resource Center to host Identity, Authentication and the Road Ahead Event
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The Identity, Authentication and the Road Ahead event, February 4-5 from 11 a.m. - 3 p.m. EST, will bring together leaders from government, industry and the nonprofit sector to tackle critical identity issues.
The Identity, Authentication and the Road Ahead event will bring together leaders from government, industry and the nonprofit sector to tackle critical identity issues. We hope that the two-day event highlights how government and decision-makers can address the pain points in our identity infrastructure and leads to discussions on how to improve identity use and protection in America, said Eva Velasquez, president and CEO of the Identity Theft Resource Center.
The Identity Theft Resource Center's annual report shows data breaches are down, but thieves are taking advantage of people working from home to steal organizations' data.
Reported U.S. data breaches and inadvertent data exposure in 2020 (Source: ITRC)
The number of data breaches being reported in the U.S. and elsewhere each year continues to decline. But security experts say this unfortunately can be explained by criminals increasingly focusing on lucrative ransomware and business email compromise scams, which require scant data to be successful.
In the U.S., reported data breaches and inadvertent data exposure incidents decreased by 19% from 1,473 in 2019 to 1,108 in 2020, as did the overall number of exposed records, according to the Identity Theft Resource Center, a nonprofit organization based in San Diego, California, that provides no-cost assistance to U.S. identity theft victims to help resolve their cases. The ITRC recently released its 15th annual Data Breach Report.
Cybercriminals shifted away from stealing individual consumers information in 2020 to focus on bigger, more profitable attacks.
Jan 29th, 2021
Cybercriminals shifted away from stealing individual consumers information in 2020 to focus on bigger, more profitable attacks on businesses, according to a report from the Identity Theft Resource Center.
The nonprofit, which supports victims of identity crime, found that the number of U.S. data breaches fell 19 percent in 2020 to 1,108. But the number of individual victims of such cybercrimes fell 66 percent compared with the year prior.
Ransomware and phishing attacks are now the preferred form of data theft because they require less effort and generate bigger payouts. The ITRC said that one ransomware attack can generate as much revenue in minutes as hundreds of individual identity theft attempts over months or years.