Last July 2019, beauty retailer Sephora became a victim of a major data breach – which affected its customers in the Philippines. While this is especially concerning for local make-up lovers whose stolen data included their names, email addresses, birthdates, encrypted passwords, and logs regarding their beauty preferences, it begs us to reconsider how many data breaches have occurred for 2019 alone. Here are some statistics on data breaches that should ring our alarms over cybersecurity:

 

• The average time it takes to identify a data breach is 196 days: According to a 2018 article by digital security provider Norton, that is how long it takes for a breach to be detected, which is not very comforting if you stop to imagine how much can be done in six months.
• Around 30% of phishing emails are opened by users, with 12% of those users clicking on the infected link: Verizon reports these figures which show that while people are told to think before they click, quite a number still get tricked.
• Using “123456” for a password puts you at risk, along with other 23 million people: Have I Been Pwned and Troy Hunt revealed other high-risk passwords, such as “123456789”, “qwerty”, and “superman”.
• It takes an average of 39 seconds for a hacker to attack: In a study done by the Clark School at the University of Maryland, they also found that the computers they used for the experiment were hacked an average of 2,244 times a day.
• 360,000 malware samples are generated every day: Kaspersky Lab found that these new malware files encounter 29.4% of user computers every year.

 

This article is part of the Banker’s Association of the Philippines’ (BAP) #CyberSafe campaign, where the BAP aims to promote awareness in cybersecurity. The campaign will upload new posts tackling common web security questions and issues on Wednesdays and Sundays every week.

 

For more information about phishing and malware, please visit these links: Phishing 101 and Malware 101.