Security vendor Bitglass recently analysed data breaches disclosed by banks, insurance companies, investment firms, and other financial services institutions thus far in 2018 and compared it with the same data from two years ago. Between January and August this year, financial firms disclosed three times as many breaches as they did in the same period in 2016. There are103 in 2018 compared to 37 two years ago. The top three breaches alone this year compromised more records than the 64,512 records exposed in all of 2016, Bitglass said.
Hacking and malware were once again the primary causes like they were in 2016, and accounted for 74% of the data breaches that financial companies have disclosed so far this year. Nearly 15% of the breaches resulted from accidental data disclosures.
Among the financial institutes that have disclosed breaches this year is RBC Royal Bank, Goldman Sachs, Fidelity Investments, Sallie Mae, and Dun & Bradstreet.
The biggest incident involved an employee at SunTrust Banks who stole the names, addresses, phone numbers, and account balances of some 1.5 million of the banks' customers. In another instance, attackers managed to gain access to the Royal Bank of Canada's travel rewards website and steal payment card data belonging to some 66,000 individuals. The breach numbers suggest that while financial services companies spend more on cybersecurity than most other organizations, and are more heavily regulated than others, the sector as a whole doesn't appear to become a whole lot more secure over time.
