Global Data Breaches Responsible for the Disclosure of Personal Information: 2015 & 2016 J
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Global Data Breaches Responsible for the Disclosure of Personal Information: 2015 & 2016 J. Botha1, 3, M.M. Grobler2, M.M. Eloff3 1Council for Scientific and Industrial Research (CSIR), Pretoria, South Africa 2Data61, Commonwealth Scientific and Industrial Organisation, Melbourne, Australia 3Institute for Corporate Citizenship, University of South Africa (UNISA), Pretoria, South Africa [email protected] [email protected] [email protected] Abstract: Data breaches have gained extensive coverage as businesses and organisations of all sizes become more dependent on digital data, cloud computing and workforce mobility. Companies store sensitive or confidential data on local machines, enterprise databases and cloud servers. To breach a company’s data one needs to gain access to restricted networks. Although this is a difficult task that requires specialised skills, hackers continuously identify vulnerabilities and loopholes to gain access and conduct data breaches. The Privacy Rights Clearinghouse1 recorded 901,010,077 data breaches since 2005, with only 5,220 data breaches made public. In 2015 some of the world’s largest recorded data breaches occurred; yet a total of only 266 data breaches were made public. 2016 still had a number of major data breaches and a total of 472 breaches were made public. When conducting business in the modern era, data protection and management of personal information have become an integral aspect for organisations and individuals. Despite increased focus on personal information and the existence of data protection legislation internationally, data breaches remain a common occurrence resulting in major cost implications. This paper investigates the most significant data breaches in 2015 and 2016 responsible for the leakage of personal information, with the aim of identifying a general trend in terms of data breaches and personal identifiable (PII) leakage. Keywords: Data Breaches, Data Leakage, Hack, PII, Privacy 1 Introduction An essential part of the digital economy today is security and privacy. Policies and legislations are being established world-wide to ensure that people around the world have an open and interconnected digital world (oecd.org 2013). However, even with comprehensive policies and privacy legislation already established in a number of countries across the world, data breaches are not only increasing in frequency, but also in breach size. It is possible to say that these breaches have now become a fact of digital life (Weise 2016). A data breach occur when personal identifiable information (PII) has been lost or maliciously stolen and therefore is at risk of being exposed (Romanosky, S. 2011). A data breach can result in large numbers of compromised records containing PII and could potentially lead to identity theft and other related crimes. PII can include an individual’s government issued identification; contact information; birth date and place; online account information; medical, employment or financial records; biometric information and geographical information (FreedomidDirect n.d.). Attackers continuously discover methods and ways to intrude networks and steal private or confidential information. As such, cybercrime is rated as the number one national security threat by the USA Director of National Intelligence (Experian Inc 2016). At the time of writing, the Privacy Rights Clearinghouse (Privacy Rights Clearinghouse n.d.), reporting data breaches since 2005, recorded 906,388,226 breaches, with only 5,285 made public. The Identity Theft Resource Center (ITRC), also reporting data breaches since 2005, has recorded 5,810 reported breaches in total. Some of the largest data breaches ever were recorded in 2015, hitting the healthcare, financial, higher-education and federal markets. In some instances it even hit the security industry itself (Kuranda 2015). Research indicates that the medical and healthcare industry are increasingly being targeted by cybercriminals (Davis 2015). This paper presents an overview, in Sections 2 and 3, of the most significant data breaches of 2015 and 2016, responsible for the disclosure of PII. The significance of a data breach is measured according to the type of data 1 https://www.privacyrights.org/data-breaches stolen as well as the number of records compromised and exposed, and not the cost or severity of the incident. Data is provided on the targeted company/agency; the country; the date of the data breach; the published date and the number of exposed records. Each data breach is categorised according to the sectors in which the targeted organisation operates. Other noteworthy security breaches that did not necessarily result in the exposure of PII are mentioned in Section 4. A comparative review on data breaches is provided, in Section 5, to identify whether the general trend in terms of targeted sector remains the same regardless of whether the data breach result in PII leakage. Data has been collected using existing literature, including governmental and private industry reports. 2 Most Significant Data Breaches of 2015 The number of data breaches in 2015 decreased marginally from the number of data breaches in 2014; however, the number of exposed records doubled from 2014 to 2015. In 2015, some of the world’s largest data breaches occurred, but only 266 were made public (Privacy Rights Clearinghouse n.d.). The number of reported data breaches tracked by the ITRC in 2015 is 781, the second highest since 2005 (ITRC n.d.). Figure 1 indicates that 40% of the breaches originated from the business sector, nearly 36% from the health/medical sector, just over 9% from the banking/financial sector, about 8% from the government/military sector and over 7% from the education sector. The main motive for data breaches are financial gains. However, 2015 has seen a shift in motives towards obtaining personal information. The breached data is used to compel behaviour changes in breached individuals or groups, for social justice purposes and even to embarrass a nation (ITRC n.d.). 2015 Data Breach Sectors 7% Business 8% Health/Medical 9% 40% Banking/Financial Government/Military 36% Education Figure 1. 2015 Data Breach Sectors (Compiled from ITRC n.d.) Table 1 lists 23 of the most significant data breaches of 2015, sorted according to breached date. The following sections discuss the data breaches presented in Table 1 in more detail, grouped by sector. Where a breach is categorised in more than one sector, it will only be discussed once. Table 1. Largest Data Breaches of 2015 (Compiled from IdentityForce 2015; BLI n.d.) Sectors Records Breached Published Company / Agency [Country] Breached Date Date (Approx.) Military Business Education Government/ Health/Medical Banking/Financial Turkish Citizenship Database [Turkey] 2015.01.12 2016.04.04 49.6m+ Topface [Russia] 2015.01.20 2015.01.26 20m Anthem [USA] 2015.01.27 2015.02.04 78.8m JPMorgan Chase [USA] 2015.02.10 2015.11.## 100m+ TalkTalk [UK] 2015.02.27 2015.11.06 150k+ OOOwebhost/troyhunt.com [Global] 2015.03.30 2015.10.29 13.5m Sectors Records Breached Published Company / Agency [Country] Breached Date Date (Approx.) Military Business Education Government/ Health/Medical Banking/Financial Office of Personnel Management (OPM) [USA] 2015.04.01 2015.06.## 22m AdultFriendFinder.com [UK] 2015.05.21 2015.05.21 4m Internal Revenue Service (IRS) [USA] 2015.05.26 2016.02.29 700k+ Gaana.com [Pakistan] 2015.05.28 2015.05.28 10m Wattpad [USA] 2015.05.29 2015.08.07 40m Bharat Sanchar Nigam Limited (BSNL) [India] 2015.07.04 2015.07.05 30m Hacking Team [Italy] 2015.07.05 2015.07.29 1m UCLA Health System [USA] 2015.07.17 2015.07.17 4.5m Ashley Madison [Canada] 2015.07.20 2015.08.18 37m Korea Pharmaceutical Info. Center [Korea] 2015.07.26 2015.07.26 43m Experian/T-Mobile [USA] 2015.09.03 2015.10.01 15m 21st Century Oncology [USA] 2015.10.03 2016.03.10 2.2m TalkTalk [UK] 2015.10.22 2015.10.22 4m Nicchu Shinsei Corp [Japan] 2015.11.06 2016.03.26 18m VTech [Hong Kong + Global] 2015.11.14 2015..11.27 11.6m+ US Voters Database [USA] 2015.12.28 2015.12.28 191m UC Berkeley [USA] 2015.12.28 2016.02.29 80k+ Business Twelve major data breaches occurred in 2015 within the business sector. The Russian-based dating site, Topface, has been hacked in January 2015 exposing almost 20m logon credentials (BLI n.d.). AdultFriendFinder.com was hacked in May 2015. The site contains over 60m members worldwide of which 7m is based in the UK. Hackers have stolen millions of sensitive information records, of which almost 4m records were exposed. The type of data exposed includes users’ sexual preferences and orientation, as well as users looking for swingers parties and extramarital affairs (White 2015). The extramarital affairs website, Ashley Madison, was hacked by the Impact Team hacker group in July 2015. This breach revealed financial records as well as 37m users’ PII (Davis 2015). The largest theft of customer data from a USA financial institution occurred when JPMorgan was hacked in February 2015. Fifteen companies and more than 100m people were affected; more than 80% of the victims were from JPMorgan Chase. Three hackers involved have been charged (IdentityForce 2015). A hacker hacked into OOOwebhost, a free web hosting service, and dumped 13.5m records of PII, including passwords in plain text (BLI n.d.). Gaana.com suffered a massive data breach in May 2015 exposing over 10m users’ PII. The attack was discovered and published only hours after the breach. Within one hour after discovery the vulnerability was patched (BLI n.d.). Wattpad, the world’s largest readers and writer’s community, experienced a data breach where 40m people’s PII was compromised (BLI n.d.). In October 2015 a data breach on Experian, the world’s biggest consumer credit monitoring firm, was disclosed. Since Experian processes T-Mobile’s credit applications, T-Mobile was also affected.