The world set a new record for data breaches in 2016, with more than 4.2 billion exposed records, shattering the former record of 1.1 billion in 2013. But if 2016 was bad, 2017 is shaping up to be even worse. In the first six months of 2017, there were 2,227 breaches reported, exposing over 6 billion records and putting untold numbers of accounts at risk. Out of all these stolen records, a large majority include usernames and passwords, which are leveraged in 81 percent of hacking-related breaches according to the 2017 Verizon Data Breach Investigations Report.
Faced with ever-growing concerns over application and data integrity, organizations must prioritize identity protection in their security strategies. In fact, safeguarding the identity of users and managing the level of access they have to critical business applications could be the biggest security challenge organizations face in 2017.