Insurance firm Beazley analyzed more than 1,500 data breaches it serviced between 2013 and 2014, and found that the majority of the incidents were caused by unintended disclosures, via email or fax for instance, or by physical loss of paper records.
Altogether, such employee errors were said to account for 55 percent of data breaches during the time period, the company revealed.
Of note, Beazley did find that malware or spyware were the root cause of only 11 percent of breaches over the period, but that the number of such breaches spiked 20 percent between 2013 and 2014, a release from the company said. Malware or spyware-induced breaches were also more costly, the firm noted, costing organizations on average 4.5 times more than unintended disclosures, which accounted for the largest loss category in incidence.
