A new study by Imperva of 99,490 data breaches from both the UK and globally between April 2019 and December 2022 found the concerning amount of human error responsible for reporting delays, contributing to an increase in data breaches. 

Recently, human error was responsible for a data breach which led to the release of the personal information of 10,000 Police Service of Northern Ireland Staff.

According to them, a staggering 37% of breaches could be attributed to human error, and 40% of breaches took more than 72 hours to be reported to the Information Commissioner’s Office (ICO), and 18% took longer than a week. The report goes on  to say 32% of all breaches that were reported to the ICO could have been avoided through better data management and security practices. 

The study identified data belonging to over 200 million individuals in the UK alone, which equates to each citizen’s data being compromised on at least three occasions. 

The financial impact of these breaches also came into question. Where the ‘most notable’ breaches amounted to £13.5 in losses, only 6% of that is attributed to regulatory fines. At the pace the ICO fines organisations, it would take them 28 years to get the equivalent of just one of the ‘most notable’ data breaches. 

According to Terry Ray, senior vice president of data security GTM and Field CTO at Imperva, organisations are prioritising measures that demonstrate compliance on paper over those that provide genuine data security. 

“In many cases, initiatives that meet the letter of compliance will not in fact prevent organisations from suffering the financial impact of a data breach, which can dwarf any potential fines,” said Ray. 

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The most common reason for a breach, human error, comes in many forms. The most common of which was sharing data with the wrong person, accounting for 23% of data breaches. Another significant human error which causes data breaches was someone leaving data open to theft, be it through not securing it properly or losing the data, which accounted for 11% of data breaches. 

“The truth is the vast majority of organisations are not set up to execute a successful data security strategy,” said Ray. “Too many are just carrying out tick box exercises while data breaches rise by around 34% annually.

“Often, it’s because businesses simply don’t know if the data security investments they’re making are having any impact. Without clear metrics that can indicate whether organisations are moving in the right direction, and that they’re more secure today than they were yesterday, we’re going to continue seeing the number and cost of breaches rise.”