According to the Office of the Australian Information Commissioner (OAIC), there was a 19% increase in data breaches from July to December 2019, compared to the first half of last year.
More specifically, the OAIC reported that there were 537 breaches compared to 460 in the previous six months.
The report revealed that malicious attacksstill account for the majority of data breaches, accounting for 64% or 343 breaches, 61 more than in the previous half-year.
230 of the total breaches were identified as incidents such as phishing , malware or ransomware , brute force attacks or stolen credentials .
12% is represented by the theft of documents or data storage devices, as well as threats coming from employees themselves or internal partners.
Data breaches that were the result of human error accounted for 170, or 32% of all breaches, down from 34% in the last reporting period.
Of these, 49 were due to sending personal information to the wrong recipient via email, while another 40 were due to the unintentional publication of personal information and 18 were due to the loss of data from devices .
The report also showed that while there were only four NDB notifications related to the unsafe disposal of information, the average number of people affected was 1,574, compared to sending emails to the wrong recipient, which affected an average of 340 people.
The report also cited one data breach that affected 10 million or more people and two others that had affected between 1 and 10 million people.
In terms of the types of personal information involved in breaches across all sectors, the OAIC found that 411 of the cases reported between July and December 2019 were contact details, such as a home address, telephone number or email address. 198 were financial information ,such as bank accounts or credit cards, and 162 involved identity information, such as a passport number, driving licence number or other government identifiers.
