According to Breach Level Index (breachlevelindex.com), more than six million data records are stolen each day. Most of the damage is caused by the major data breaches that seem to get all the headlines. During the last few months of 2018, for example, Marriott, Facebook, and Quora have all suffered serious data breaches.
Unfortunately, the damage doesn’t end with the breach. Often, that’s just the beginning of a long tail of collateral damage that rarely makes the news. Credentials stolen from these breaches – for example, username and password combinations – eventually find their way to the Dark Web. From there, bad actors acquire tens of millions of these credentials, then orchestrate massive automated bot attacks to see if the same user name and password combination will provide them with unauthorized access to accounts on other web sites (financial services, retail, gaming, social media, etc.)
So how pervasive is this problem, and what is the impact on organizations being targeted?