IBM Reports Fewer Records Breached in 2017 as Ransomware Escalates

IBM Security announced its 2018 X-Force Threat Intelligence Index on April 4, revealing that the number of breached records in 2017 was actually less than what was reported for 2016. According to IBM's analysis, 2.9 billion records were breached in 2017, down 25 percent from the 4 billion stolen customer data records in 2016. The decline in the number of reported data records that were stolen in breaches, however, is not an indication that cyber-crime has declined, but rather that cyber-crime has shifted. "For this report, the number of compromised records was calculated based on our analysis of publicly reported data breaches," Michelle Alvarez, threat researcher at IBM X-Force and one of the lead authors of the report, told eWEEK. "Organizations are not required to report ransomware and because of this, there isn't a running list of every ransomware attack and there isn't a per record tally like there are for breaches.