Dive Brief:

• According to a new report by Gemalto, the number of individual records compromised by data breaches declined by 41% during the first half of 2015.
• The report found identity theft is the most common type of attack, accounting for 53% of all attacks.
• The number of data breaches was actually up 10% from last year, but the number of total records lost was lower because there have been fewer large-scale breaches this year thus far compared to 2014.

Dive Insight:

According to Germalto, the healthcare and government sectors accounted for the majority of breached records so far this year, due to the Anthem Insurance and OPM breaches. The largest breach overall so far this year was the Anthem breach, which included 79 million records.  But in terms of the actual number of breaches, the healthcare sector accounted for just 21% of the total, while the financial industry was second with 16%.

While the report found that 62% of the breaches this year were attributed to malicious outsiders, it also found that 22% of the breaches were due to accidental loss by employees. Another recent study by CloudLock, a Massachusetts-based security firm, found that 1% of employees are responsible for the majority of enterprise security risk.The good news is, CIOs that push for continuous efforts to educate employees about cyber security best practices can greatly reduce those internal risks.