E-Business
Social Media Becomes Biggest Data Breach Threat – Report
Social media incidents accounted for over 56% of the 4.5 billion data records compromised worldwide in the first half of 2018.
This is according to Gemalto’s latest Breach Level Index, a global database of public data breaches.
Gemalto says over the first six months of this year, there were 945 data breaches. Just six social media breaches accounted for over half of all records compromised. This included the Cambridge Analytica-Facebook incident, where the personal information of up to 87 million users may have been improperly shared with the political consultancy.
In April, Facebook revealed that almost 60 000 South African Facebook users could have been impacted by the social network’s data leak. Last month, Facebook announced another breach affecting 50 million of its global users.
“Obviously, this year social media has been the top industry and threat vector for the compromise of personal data, a trend we can expect to continue, with more and more sectors leveraging these platforms to reach key audiences, especially political teams gearing up for major elections,” says Jason Hart, VP and CTO for data protection at Gemalto.
Just this week, Google announced it was shutting down the consumer version of its social network Google+ and revealed that data from up to 500 000 users may have been exposed to external developers by a bug that was present for more than two years in its systems.
Closer to home, South African data centre operator Hetzner yesterday disclosed a “security incident” involving account information; this after it previously revealed it had been hacked almost a year ago.
Rising risk
Compared to the same period in 2017, Gemalto found the number of lost, stolen or compromised records increased by 133%, though the total number of breaches slightly decreased over the same period, signalling an increase in the severity of each incident.
According to the Breach Level Index, almost 15 billion data records have been exposed since 2013, when the index began benchmarking publicly disclosed data breaches.
“During the first six months of 2018, more than 25 million records were compromised or exposed every day, or 291 records every second, including medical, credit card and/or financial data or personally identifiable information,” the report reads.
“This is particularly concerning, since only 1% of the stolen, lost or compromised data records were protected by encryption to render the information useless, a percent-and-a-half drop compared to the first six months of 2017.”
Breach sources
Gemalto says malicious outsiders caused the largest percentage of data breaches (56%), a decrease of almost 7% over the second half of 2017, and accounted for over 80% of all stolen, compromised or lost records. Accidental loss accounted for over 879 million (9%) of the records lost this half, the second most popular cause of data breaches, representing over one-third of incidents.
Identity theft continues to be the leading type of data breach, as it has been since Gemalto first started tracking in 2013. While the number of identity theft breaches increased by 13% over the second half of 2017 to just over 64%, the number of records stolen through these incidents increased by 539%, representing over 87% of all records stolen.
“Financial access incidents show a disturbing trend in the escalation of severity,” Gemalto says.
Although it found that overall incident numbers are on the decline, 171 in the first half of 2017 compared to 123 in the same period in 2018, the number of records breached in the six-month period increased from 2.7 million in 2017 to 359 million this year.
Most sectors saw an increase in the number of incidents compared to the previous half. The exceptions were government, professional services, retail and technology, though both government and retail saw an increase in the number of records breached through fewer events.
Healthcare continues to lead in number of incidents (27%), with the largest such incident, 211 LA County, exposing 3.5 million records through accidental loss.
Social media ranks top for number of records breached due to the high-profile customer data compromises at Facebook and Twitter, although the number of incidents is the lowest, making up less than 1% of the total.
E-Business
Cyber Resilience a Critical Priority for Manufacturing Amid Rapid Digitalization – Report Shows
As 60% of manufacturers race toward full digitalisation, cyber risk is increasingly manifesting as a business risk, according to a new global report by Kaspersky and VDC Strategy.
This means cybersecurity is not merely a compliance function, it is a cornerstone of production assurance, safeguarding uptime, quality, and operational continuity.
Manufacturers are modernising to deliver safer, more consistent and more cost-effective production and digitalization is moving fast: just 9% of organisations describe themselves as fully digital today, but 60% expect to get there within two years, according to the joint report by Kaspersky and VDC, titled ‘Cyber Resilience, Built for Manufacturing’.
That shift links shop-floor equipment, production lines and site operations to platforms such as Manufacturing execution systems (MES), Supervisory control and data acquisition (SCADA) and historians, turning many plants into cyber-physical systems (CPS), where a digital disruption doesn’t stay digital. It can slow production lines, quarantine work in progress, invalidate traceability records, or halt production outright.
What’s driving manufacturing digitalization?
Manufacturers are digitising for measurable operational gains, not novelty. Survey respondents identified the primary drivers of their digital transformation strategy as:
- Improving production output or efficiency (24%)
- Reducing operational or production expenses (15%)
- Enabling new strategic opportunities (14%)
- Improving cyber resilience (13%)
The same connected systems that unlock these gains, including MES, IIoT sensors, automated material handling, remote engineering access, also become the systems that determine whether production can be trusted to keep running.
Cyber risk is now a business risk
Cyber risk has evolved from a mere IT concern to a direct threat to revenue generation, as environments transform into cyber-physical systems. In these integrated settings, digital disruptions like malware no longer just affect data, they can cause unsafe operations, scrapped batches, and halted production on the plant floor. This shift highlights the urgent need to treat cybersecurity as a key part of operational resilience.
According to the report, nearly 60% of manufacturing organisations estimate that cyber incidents cause damages exceeding $1 million per event, with an average disruption of 15.3 hours. The most significant losses often result from production halts, missed delivery commitments, and penalties, rather than just forensic costs.
In this context, downtime links cybersecurity risks to overall business performance. Cyber incidents can reduce Overall Equipment Effectiveness (OEE), strain staffing, and disrupt supply chains. Recovery involves more than system restore, it requires re-establishing confidence in process parameters, quality records, and traceability before resuming operations.
Mature cybersecurity programs now incorporate OT security into governance, focusing on metrics valued by production leaders such as time to restore, backup confidence, legacy asset coverage, and safe degraded operation. This alignment ensures cybersecurity supports continuous production and resilience, not just IT compliance.
However, challenges remain due to split ownership. While 59% of organisations’ IT departments manage security policies, these often overlook plant realities. Managing many security tools (44%) and OT patching issues (38%) show that cybersecurity must be embedded into daily routines of production, engineering, and quality teams. Only through such integration can cybersecurity effectively enhance operational reliability and defend against evolving threats.
“As manufacturing environments become increasingly interconnected, cybersecurity shifts focus from merely adding protective layers to ensuring the availability, resilience, and integrity of production processes. The goal is to minimise operational impact and speed up recovery, rather than solely preventing intrusions.
“Kaspersky offers a unified ecosystem that integrates IT, OT, and IIoT security, empowering manufacturers to pursue digital transformation securely. This strategy helps maintain operational continuity and reduces long-term cybersecurity costs,” comments Andrey Strelkov, Head of Industrial Cybersecurity Product Line at Kaspersky.
To implement this strategy, manufacturing companies can leverage solutions from the Kaspersky OT Cybersecurity Ecosystem, centered around Kaspersky Industrial CyberSecurity (KICS), a native Extended Detection and Response platform designed for critical infrastructure protection. KICS enables centralised detection and response to complex attacks across the entire industrial network, ensuring comprehensive visibility and security.
Nigeria Data Protection Commission (NDPC) has commenced a forensic investigation into the University of Lagos (UNILAG), Lotus Bank and Hackerbella Ltd over alleged violations of data protection laws involving students’ personal information.
The investigation follows public complaints alleging that students’ personal data were used to open bank accounts without a lawful basis.
Dr Vincent Olatunji, national commissioner and chief executive officer of the NDPC, directed the investigation team to conduct a comprehensive assessment of the circumstances surrounding the collection, processing, use and disclosure of the affected students’ personal data.
The investigation will also determine the respective roles and responsibilities of UNILAG, Lotus Bank and Hackerbella in the alleged processing of the data.
According to the Commission, the investigation will assess the data protection compliance obligations of the parties under the Nigeria Data Protection Act, 2023 (NDP Act), as well as potential risks posed to the rights and freedoms of the affected data subjects.
The NDPC said the probe would cover several areas, including Data Protection Impact Assessments (DPIAs), the lawfulness and transparency of credit scoring or profiling activities, and the use of automated decision-making systems.
It will also examine the adequacy of privacy notices, data-sharing arrangements, lawful bases for processing, data minimisation and purpose limitation.
Other areas include data retention policies and the adequacy of technical and organisational measures put in place to safeguard the rights and personal data of affected students.
The Commission reiterated that institutions entrusted with the personal data of students, staff and other members of their communities have a heightened responsibility to ensure that such information is processed lawfully, fairly, transparently and securely.
The NDPC therefore warned educational institutions that are yet to comply with its existing data protection compliance directives to take immediate steps to achieve compliance.
The Commission said it would continue to exercise its regulatory mandate to protect the privacy rights of Nigerians and ensure that organisations processing personal data comply with the provisions of the Nigeria Data Protection Act, 2023.
Microsoft is planning to unveil its new Maia 300 AI chip this fall, potentially as soon as next month, The Information reported on Monday, citing people with direct knowledge of the plans.
The company introduced its Maia AI chip in November 2023 but has lagged rivals such as Alphabet and Amazon in scaling up its in-house chip efforts as it seeks to reduce its reliance on Nvidia’s costly processors.
Google began recognizing revenue from direct sales of its custom AI chips, called Tensor Processing Units, in the quarter ended June, while Amazon has also seen growing adoption of its processors, including its Trainium chips.
Microsoft has been in talks with chipmaker TSMC to secure manufacturing capacity for more than 300,000 units of the chip for delivery in 2027, according to the report. It is also looking to significantly ramp up production and persuade major cloud customers such as Anthropic to adopt the chip.
Microsoft ultimately aims to secure capacity for more than 1 million Maia 300 chips, though component supplies and ongoing capacity negotiations with TSMC could constrain its plans, according to the report.
It unveiled its second-generation Maia 200 in January, built by TSMC using 3-nanometer technology.
Microsoft packed the chip with a significant amount of SRAM, a type of memory that can provide speed advantages for AI systems handling large numbers of user requests.
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