The number of exposed records registered a massive 284% spike compared to the previous year (which had 5.3 billion records exposed), and also marked a 91% increase compared to 2017 (7.95 billion records).
A total of 7.2 billion records were compromised between October 1 and December 31, 2019, with four events accounting for 93.5% of these records. All four involved open, misconfigured databases that were made publicly accessible.
The number of reported data breaches was of 7,098 last year, representing only a 1% increase compared to the 7,035 breaches reported in 2018.
