Federal Agencies: leaders in data breaches

Researchers from Thales e-Security released an interesting report, explaining the data-breach tendencies in 2018. It might come as a shock but the federal agencies have been indicated as the leading target for hackers. In the Data Threat Report, Federal Government Edition, the specialists described the current situation of Federal Agencies and called it the “perfect storm”.

It is explained that U.S. federal government is failing to protect its cyber security, and the inadequate protection plans frequently lead to data breaches, exposing the secrets of federal agencies. In addition to that, Thales e-Security indicates that data breaches puts 330 million citizens at risk of having their data exploited for cybercrimes.

Data breach is an unpleasant phrase for any company, and some have had to suffer the consequences of cyber-attacks. One of the most recent data-breaches we discussed was the data leakage in Delta Air. However, news about similar incidents is very frequent in our news section. For instance, Orbitz, PayPal, Uber and Instagram have all been compromised, and had to fix their broken security shields.

71% of U.S. Federal agencies have suffered from data breaches

Data breaches in federal agencies

While many sectors are facing the ugly battle against hackers, federal agencies have been calculated to suffer from more data breaches than other industry organizations and companies. Since the federal agencies are handling private information about different people, and are creating various plans for the future, data breaches in federal agencies can be extremely painful.

However, in most of our articles, discussing the situation in federal sector, we are not talking about data leakages. We have discussed the FBI’s aims to hack into mobile phones, and the fact that the bureau declares that too much security in the digital world is not always the best thing.

The Thales Data Threat report of 2018 states that 71% of all U.S. federal agencies have become victims of data breaches. In 2018, 57% of these agencies have been hacked into, and it appears that the numbers of breached organizations has grown 3 times ever since 2016. Therefore, hackers are becoming more and more aggressive.

Why have these numbers increased so much? Specialists have provided evidence that it is because of the fact that federal agencies are adopting cloud services, with many operating multi-cloud environments at rates that outstrip even those in the private sector. Federal agencies use far more infrastructure-as-a-service or platform-as-a-service providers than the private sector.

More attention to cyber security is required

Government perfectly understands the new type of threats that they have to adjust to. Therefore, many of the federal agencies are planning new projects for the sake of building more secure environments. Agencies have raised an objective of implementing better encryption technologies to protect sensitive information. Specialists explain that the usage of IaaS and PaaS has to be well-calculated and needs a detailed data security plan. Furthermore, governments have to rearrange their priorities and consider, whether adopting new digital technology is worth it if these changes put digital information at risk.

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