Apple has released the findings of an independent study conducted by Massachusetts Institute of Technology professor Stuart Madnick, reporting that the total number of data breaches in the world more than tripled between 2013 and 2022, exposing 2.6 billion personal records in the past two years alone. The findings underscore that strong protections against data breaches in the cloud, like end-to-end encryption, have only grown more essential.
The report illustrates that, in the US alone, there were nearly 20% more breaches in just the first nine months of 2023 than in any prior year. A 2023 survey found that over 80% of breaches involved data stored in the cloud. This is after attacks targeting cloud infrastructure nearly doubled from 2021 to 2022.
The threat of ransomware has also grown in 2023, as shown by the fact that there were nearly 70% more attacks reported through to September 2023 than in the first three quarters of 2022. In fact, it was found that there were more ransomware attacks through to September 2023 than in all of 2022 combined.
Craig Federighi, SVP, Software Engineering, Apple
Bad actors continue to pour enormous amounts of time and resources into finding more creative and effective ways to steal consumer data, and we won’t rest in our efforts to stop them. As threats to consumer data grow, we’ll keep finding ways to fight back on behalf of our users by adding even more powerful protections.
