As the year comes to a close, many people pause to reflect on the past 12 months and prepare for the new year ahead. That pause and reflection can often help us reset our perspective and prepare for the new year.
When it comes to evaluating the evolving risks to our personal information, an end-of-year recap can be useful to prepare for the new risk trends that are on the horizon.
That’s why the IdentityForce team and Eva Velasquez, President and CEO of the Identity Theft Resource Center, connected for a recent webinar to compare notes from 2022 to examine what threats might be seen in 2023.
Here are a few highlights from that discussion. The full webinar, Surveying 2023’s Cyber Landscape: Preparing for Next Year’s Risks Now, is also available to listen to on demand.
At the beginning of 2022, there were serious concerns about increased levels of cybercrime. After all, the previous year had seen a historic number of data breaches, with roughly 295 million individuals having their data compromised. With that much data being exposed, the question of how that stolen data would be used was obvious.
The pace of breaches in 2022 has been below that of last year, so the total number of victims for the year has been tracking lower than last year. Still, there were more than 165 million victims impacted by data compromise from January to the end of September.
A single breach can also alter the numbers dramatically. In August, the number of victims increased by 100 million based on just two breaches.
Cyberattacks are far and away the biggest cause of data breaches, accounting for 88% of breaches in the third quarter of 2022.
The most common type of cyberattack is phishing — a kind of social engineering attack where criminals send an email pretending to be a trusted person or business to get victims to reveal their personal or payment information. In fact, phishing has been the top method of attack since the start of 2019. The next most common is ransomware.
Based on that breakdown, criminals seem to be focused on tricking people in order to get what they need rather than breaking the cybersecurity defenses that have been put up—which mirrors research from Verizon that showed 82% of breaches originated as the result of a human element, like an employee falling victim to a phishing attempt.
Based on the recent trends seen by Sontiq, IdentityForce and the ITRC, there are a few trends we expect in 2023:
Given those threats, what can be done to reduce the risk of a breach or identity crimes in the coming year?
For more insights into the identity threat trends expected in 2023, you can listen to the full webinar Surveying 2023’s Cyber Landscape: Preparing for Next Year’s Risks Now on demand.
Even more insights and recommendations are available in the newly released Protecting What Matters Most — our annual eBook now in its sixth edition! Filled with the latest research and actionable insights from Sontiq’s team of identity protection professionals, it reveals the challenges on the threat horizon and how you can take steps now to avoid them. To benefit from these recommendations and protect all that you’ve built, get your complimentary copy today.