The Financial Matrix: Bitglass’ 2019 Financial Breach Report

by Juan Lugo on December 16, 2019

As the advancements in cloud computing continue expanding across various industries, organizations have been able ease operational processes and increase efficiency. However, these enterprises are compiling more data than ever before and storing it in the cloud, and without the proper security tools, this can increase the likelihood of a breach.

Financial services organizations, for example, are entrusted with personally identifiable information (PII), which entails consumer names, home and email addresses, Social Security numbers, banking routing and account numbers, and much more. It should be no surprise that this industry is a big target for threat actors that aim to compromise this sensitive information for either monetary or vindictive gain.

Bitglass takes a closer look at the current state of security within the financial services industry, analyzing data breaches in the past year in its report: The Financial Matrix. The study included the number of breached records increased exponentially from 2018 to 2019, by nearly 5000%. However, the number of breaches within the industry decreased by nearly 20%. This indicates that although data leaks occur at a lower rate than other industries, the magnitude of the breaches within the financial sector far exceed those of all other industries combined. This is due to mega breaches, or black swan events, like that of the 2019 Capital One breach which affected over 106 million people.

Surprisingly, there are a number of leading corporations within the industry that are repeat offenders and have yet to implement the proper measures to secure their customers’ PII. By deploying a multi-mode cloud access security broker (CASB), such as Bitglass, these organizations can secure their ecosystems, regaining visibility and control of all corporate data, without negatively affecting their employees’ user experience.