13 Data Breach Facts Every Campus Protection Pro Should Know

Data breaches are continuing to affect all industries, including K-12 schools, universities and hospitals. And, as many have learned the hard way, they can be extremely costly and detrimental to an organization’s image.

A new report found there were 122 cyber attacks at K-12 public education institutions in 2018, including the San Diego Unified School District where the personal data of more than 500,000 students and staff were stolen over an 11-month period.

In April, Washington State University paid $4.7 million when a hard drive containing nearly 1.3 million people’s personal information was stolen. Also in April, a data breach at Georgia Tech exposed the information of over 1.3 million people.

In February, Community Health System (CHS), one of the largest health systems in the country, paid $4.5 million to settle a class action HIPAA breach lawsuit after nearly 4.5 million patients’ personal data, including Social Security Numbers, were accessed.

As you can see, hackers do not discriminate — how kind of them! That is why your institution cannot afford — perhaps, quite literally — to not have the proper safeguards in place to protect the information of your students, staff and patients.

That being said, it is also important to keep up-to-date on data breach averages and statistics. This 13-question quiz will help give you an idea of the costliness of a data breach and how data breaches in the United States compare to the rest of the world. All of the questions were written based on results from IBM’s 2018 Cost of a Data Breach Study.

We’ve also included some helpful resources as well at the end of the quiz, such as prevention best practices and how to properly dispose of electronic devices with sensitive information.

NO PEEKING, but after you take the quiz, check out this article’s slideshow to see some charts from the study.

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