Data Breaches: What Happened over the Last 20 Years?

Faheem Ullah, Liwei Wang, Uswa Fatima, Muhammad Imran Taj

2025

Abstract

With the rapid development of information technology, commercial software has been inadequate in protecting personal data resulting in multiple data breaches across industries. However, comprehensive research on data breaches remains limited. This study investigates their yearly trend, associated costs, impacted industries, types of compromised data, primary causes, affected regions, and tools used. Using web crawling, we collect reports from news headlines and extract insights from the data using natural language processing. Our results indicate a consistent upward trend in the number of data breaches over the years, with an average cost of $2.7 million per incident. IT industry is the main target of data breaches while emails are the most common type of data breached. Hacking is the major cause of data breaches with North America being the most targeted region. SSH, RDP, FTP, Intruder, and Metasploit emerge as the top five tools used to breach data. Our findings show how things have changed over the past two decades in relation to data breaches and highlight the urgent need for enhanced security measures to mitigate evolving data losses, particularly in high-risk industries.

Paper Citation

in Harvard Style

Ullah F., Wang L., Fatima U. and Taj M. (2025). Data Breaches: What Happened over the Last 20 Years?. In Proceedings of the 14th International Conference on Data Science, Technology and Applications - Volume 1: DATA; ISBN 978-989-758-758-0, SciTePress, pages 398-406. DOI: 10.5220/0013514000003967

in Bibtex Style

@conference{data25,
author={Faheem Ullah and Liwei Wang and Uswa Fatima and Muhammad Taj},
title={Data Breaches: What Happened over the Last 20 Years?},
booktitle={Proceedings of the 14th International Conference on Data Science, Technology and Applications - Volume 1: DATA},
year={2025},
pages={398-406},
publisher={SciTePress},
organization={INSTICC},
doi={10.5220/0013514000003967},
isbn={978-989-758-758-0},
}

in EndNote Style

TY - CONF

JO - Proceedings of the 14th International Conference on Data Science, Technology and Applications - Volume 1: DATA
TI - Data Breaches: What Happened over the Last 20 Years?
SN - 978-989-758-758-0
AU - Ullah F.
AU - Wang L.
AU - Fatima U.
AU - Taj M.
PY - 2025
SP - 398
EP - 406
DO - 10.5220/0013514000003967
PB - SciTePress