Data Breaches in 2022 Came Close to an All-Time High

2022 wasnt quiteas bad as 2021when it came to personal data violations, but it was about as close as you can get.

The Identity Theft Resource Center, in its17thannual Data Breach Report, says the number of data breaches at corporations was just 60 events short of the all-time high, which was set the previous year. All totaled, 1,802 data compromises were reported.

Ironically, Russias invasion of Ukraine is likely the only reason a new record wasnt set last year. The ITRC says the first half of the year saw cybercriminals based in Russia distracted by the war, as well as the extreme volatility in the cryptocurrency markets (a critical source of funding for those operators).

While the number of attacks was slightly lower, the number of people impacted by these data breaches skyrocketed. More than 422 million people were impacted last year by identity theft, an increase of almost 41.5% from the previous year. And thats almost entirely due to Twitter.

Through November, it appears that the number of data compromise victims would once again trend downward for the sixth year in a row. Then came news that the personal information of 221 million Twitter users had shown up on the dark web.