New Delhi, March 10th: India is the second most affected country when it comes to data breaches and more than 1.8 million (18.7 million) personal records of Indian citizens have been compromised by 10 data breaches in the past 20 years, such a report revealed.
A data broker is a company that aggregates information from a variety of sources, processes it to enrich, cleanse, or analyze it, and licenses it to other organizations. Data breach: Nearly six lakh HDFC bank customers’ details leaked on dark web, bank denies.
According to Incogni, a leading data removal service from VPN service provider Surfshark, India is among the top five countries hit hardest by the most serious data broker breaches, led by the US, where a massive 207.6 million personal records of its citizens were compromised in the same period. The other hardest-hit countries are the UK, Brazil and Canada.
“Privacy is a growing concern, yet many people are still unaware of the hidden market that data brokers operate in. In reviewing the results, we found that data brokers can be affected by a data breach just like any other business. However, they are the ones dealing with huge amounts of sensitive data,” said Darius Belejevas, head of Incogni.
Incogni researchers analyzed 506 registered US-based data brokers and found that over the past 20 years, 23 (4.5 percent) of these companies have suffered data breaches and at least 10 data broker breaches have resulted in at least 1 million users to date Records leaked, exposing a total of 444.5 million records. Data Breach: Indian government sector is the top target for hackers as cyber attacks increase by 95% in the second half of 2022.
The People Data Labs breach was the most serious in each of these five countries. This breach uncovered just over a third (35.2 percent) of breached US records, about two-fifths (42.1 percent) of Brazilian records, more than half of Canadian (54.3 percent) and UK (56 .7 percent) records and over two-thirds (68.5 percent) of Indian records.
Analysis of data broker breaches showed that things have been going downhill since 2011, with a data breach happening almost every year – 2014 and 2022 being the only two exceptions.
2017 saw a massive spike that left six companies injured. With the spread of the pandemic, 2020 was a challenging year with a significant increase in cybercrime.
The number of victims of cybercrime increased dramatically by 69 percent, underscoring the seriousness of the situation. So perhaps it’s not surprising that a total of nine data breaches occurred during that time, the report showed. The number of data breaches was down in 2021, with only three breaches reported.
“While no data breach reports were received in 2022, it is important to note that data breaches are not always discovered immediately. Therefore, the accuracy of this information has yet to be confirmed,” the results showed. There have been a total of 40 incidents in which data brokers suffered data breaches, starting with the Acxiom breach in 2002.
(The story above first appeared on LatestLY on March 10, 2023 4:03 p.m. IST. For more politics, world, sports, entertainment and lifestyle news and updates, visit our website Latestly.com).
