CNBC – “Over a billion personal data records were compromised by cyberattacks in 2014, a new report has revealed, driven by high-profile breaches on Home Depot, JPMorgan and eBay. The 1,023,108,267 records breached in 2014 came from just 1,541 incidents, according to the Breach Level Index report by digital security company Gemalto. It marked a 78 percent surge in the number of personal data records compromised compared to 2013. Last year saw a number of major hacking attacks on companies including Sony Pictures Entertainment and investment bank JPMorgan. The biggest incident occurred when AliExpress, a service run by New York-listed Alibaba, was breached, leaving 300 million personal records open to hackers, who didn’t need passwords to access the accounts.”

• Gemalto Releases Findings of 2014 Breach Level Index – February 12, 2015 ─ Gemalto, the world leader in digital security, releases the latest findings of the Breach Level Index, revealing that more than 1,500 data breaches led to one billion data records compromised worldwide during 2014. These numbers represent a 49% increase in data breaches and a 78% increase in data records that were either stolen or lost compared to 2013.  Continuing with this industry-leading benchmarking from SafeNet following its acquisition by Gemalto, the Breach Level Index (BLI) is a global database of data breaches as they happen and provides a methodology for security professionals to score the severity of breaches and see where they rank among publicly disclosed breaches. The BLI calculates the severity of data breaches across multiple dimensions based on breach disclosure information.  According to data in the BLI originally developed by SafeNet, the main motivation for cybercriminals in 2014 was identity theft with 54% of the all data breaches being identity theft-based, more than any breach category including access to financial data. In addition, identity theft breaches also accounted for one-third of the most severe data breaches categorized by the BLI as either Catastrophic (with a BLI score of between 9.0 and 10) or Severe (7.0 to 8.9). Secure breaches, which involved breaches of perimeter security where compromised data was encrypted in full or in part, increased to 4% from 1%.”