Data breaches in first quarter 2018 lowest in four years

The number of data breaches in the first quarter of 2018 marked a four-year low with a total of 685 breaches. This number is down from 1,444 breaches in the first quarter of 2017 and 1,153 in the first quarter of 2016, according to Risk Based Security’s recent first quarter 2018 data breach report.

Overall, businesses saw the most reported breaches at 50.4% during the first quarter while medical breaches came in at 10.2%, according to the report.

Within the healthcare sector, practitioners’ offices saw 43.4% of the data breaches while hospitals saw 30.2% and medical facilities were at 17.1%.

A total of 1.4 billion records were exposed in the first quarter of 2018 while 3.4 billion were exposed in the first quarter of 2017, the report said. A single incident in India accounted for 81% of those exposures.