Digging Deeper into Data Breaches: An Exploratory Data Analysis of Hacking Breaches Over Time

Data breaches represent a permanent threat to all types of organizations. Although the types of breaches are different, the impacts are always the same. This paper focuses on analyzing over 9000 data breaches made public since 2005 that led to the loss of 11,5 billion individual records which have a significant financial and technical impact. Also, since the most devastating breaches are hacking breaches, we shed the light on type to unveil the most targeted organizations, and examine how the interest of hackers changes over time. On the other hand, the breaches caused by human factor are decreasing which can be explained by the awareness of employees and the application of security standards. This study would improve the state of knowledge about hacking breaches and help in securing organizations’ data by prioritizing the most attacked sectors.