With advancing technology, companies must always be prepared for the potential of a data breach. Threat actors often work nonstop while trying to gain access to sensitive company data, meaning security leaders need to work around the clock to keep themselves safe. Data breaches in 2023 were analyzed in a recent report by the Identity Theft Resource Center.

According to this report, U.S. data compromises surpassed 3,000 over the course of 2023. The total number of data breaches, exposures, leaks and “unspecified events” reached 3,205, impacting an estimated 353,027,892 victims, including those affected by multiple compromises. The 2023 compromises represent a 78% increase over the previous year and a 72% increase from the previous all-time high number of compromises set in 2021.

More than 9% of the U.S. publicly traded companies issued a data breach notice in 2023, according to the report. Public companies accounted for 40% of all data compromise victims. Publicly traded companies withheld information about an attack in 47% of notices compared to 46% of private companies, government agencies, education institutions and nonprofit organizations.

Physical breaches are down 65% since 2018. The estimated number of victims impacted represents a 16% decrease 2022, when more than half of the total annual victim count was related to three breaches announced late in the previous year. Three industries reported more than double the number of compromises compared to 2022: healthcare, financial services and transportation. Healthcare led all industries in terms of the number of reported compromises in each of the past five years, but utilities companies led in the estimated number of victims in 2023.

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Popular threat actors utilize a variety of vulnerabilities to access companies’ sensitive information. Visa analyzed payment-related fraud and data breaches throughout 2023. According to the report, the most impactful ransomware attack of 2023 affected an estimated 2,620 organizations along with 77.2 million individuals whose PII was breached across the infiltrated organizations.

The ransomware threat group known as CL0P claimed responsibility for the attack on 6 June 2023, but researchers for the report suspect that CL0P began leveraging a zero-day vulnerability (CVE-2023-34362) as early as July 2021. This followed CL0P’s deployment of ransomware on 31 January 2023 exploiting a vulnerability (CVE-2023-0669) in a different file transfer software, which allowed threat actors to obtain data from 130 organizations.

The targeted file transfer service was a common vendor across numerous merchants including financial services and institutions, retail, education, healthcare as well as other merchant sectors and industries.

Additionally, the report identified North America as the most impacted region in terms of ransomware/data breach incidents impacting the payments ecosystem. The North America region experienced nearly three times the number of ransomware attacks compared to the Europe region, which experienced the second highest level of incidents based on Visa PFD ransomware incident tracking.

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