The extreme risk of personal data breaches and the erosion of privacy

Spencer Wheatley (), Thomas Maillart and Didier Sornette

The European Physical Journal B: Condensed Matter and Complex Systems, 2016, vol. 89, issue 1, 1-12

Abstract: Personal data breaches from organisations, enabling mass identity fraud, constitute an extreme risk. This risk worsens daily as an ever-growing amount of personal data are stored by organisations and on-line, and the attack surface surrounding this data becomes larger and harder to secure. Further, breached information is distributed and accumulates in the hands of cyber criminals, thus driving a cumulative erosion of privacy. Statistical modeling of breach data from 2000 through 2015 provides insights into this risk: A current maximum breach size of about 200 million is detected, and is expected to grow by fifty percent over the next five years. The breach sizes are found to be well modeled by an extremely heavy tailed truncated Pareto distribution, with tail exponent parameter decreasing linearly from 0.57 in 2007 to 0.37 in 2015. With this current model, given a breach contains above fifty thousand items, there is a ten percent probability of exceeding ten million. A size effect is unearthed where both the frequency and severity of breaches scale with organisation size like s 0.6 . Projections indicate that the total amount of breached information is expected to double from two to four billion items within the next five years, eclipsing the population of users of the Internet. This massive and uncontrolled dissemination of personal identities raises fundamental concerns about privacy. Copyright EDP Sciences, SIF, Springer-Verlag Berlin Heidelberg 2016

Keywords: Statistical and Nonlinear Physics (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Date: 2016
References: View complete reference list from CitEc
Citations: View citations in EconPapers (20)

Downloads: (external link)
http://hdl.handle.net/10.1140/epjb/e2015-60754-4 (text/html)
Access to full text is restricted to subscribers.

Related works:
This item may be available elsewhere in EconPapers: Search for items with the same title.

Export reference: BibTeX RIS (EndNote, ProCite, RefMan) HTML/Text

Persistent link: https://EconPapers.repec.org/RePEc:spr:eurphb:v:89:y:2016:i:1:p:1-12:10.1140/epjb/e2015-60754-4

Ordering information: This journal article can be ordered from
http://www.springer.com/economics/journal/10051

DOI: 10.1140/epjb/e2015-60754-4

Access Statistics for this article

The European Physical Journal B: Condensed Matter and Complex Systems is currently edited by P. Hänggi and Angel Rubio

More articles in The European Physical Journal B: Condensed Matter and Complex Systems from Springer, EDP Sciences
Bibliographic data for series maintained by Sonal Shukla () and Springer Nature Abstracting and Indexing ().