As we’ve seen with the recent Equifax settlement, data breaches can have a huge impact on organizations and those individuals effected. The Internet Society’s Online Trust Alliance recently released their Cyber Incident & Breach Trends Report. The first heading of the report says it all, “2018 – Some Better, Some Worse, All Bad.”

Some Better: The total number of incidents were down in most areas. Data breaches were down 3.2 percent, and exposed records were down 35.9 percent, with five billion records exposed. Additionally, both ransomware and DDoS attacks were down overall.

Some Worse: The report examined financial fallout from 2 million cyber incidents and found the impact of incidents were greatly on the rise. The U.S. led with an estimated loss of $45 billion in 2018. The financial impact of ransomware alone increased by 60 percent. Cryptojacking incidents more than tripled from the year before while financial losses from the compromise of business emails doubled.

All Bad: There are no good breaches, and even though the numbers were down, Risk Based Security still reported 6,515 breaches and 5 billion exposed records. Even more cringe-worthy, the number of sensitive records exposed (447 million) is up significantly.

If there was any “hope” to be found in the report, it was that 95 percent of data breaches were preventable through following: “simple and common-sense approaches to improving security” – educating employees on data security and privacy and establishing relationships with data protection authorities. Companies and firms should not take for granted the effect that training on basic security measures can have to help secure an organization.