Abstract

The cybersecurity situation in the world is becoming more dangerous, and the number of data breaches grows and grows. The paper is a secondary data analysis research of publicly available breach archives, such as Privacy Rights Clearinghouse, HaveIBeenPwned, and Kaggle datasets. The study was performed using a quantitative, descriptive research design with the help of the R programming language and tidyverse packages to perform data wrangling, statistical analysis, and visualization. Results indicate that breaches reported have doubled during this time, with 2023 showing the highest number of 59 million breached records due to a mega-breach in the technology sector. The most targeted sectors included healthcare and government sectors, with 22.2% of the incidents each, as this data is valuable. Hacking was the most common attack (44.4%), with ransomware and phishing (22.2% each). This study highlights the trends and patterns of global cybersecurity activities between 2021 and 2024. In this paper, the Healthcare and Government Services sectors are overrepresented. It is typical of the high value of the data that they comprise the sensitivity of their operations to interference. The results prove the ongoing incomparability of phishing as an initial access technique related to attack vectors. Moreover, it founded the drastic and recent escalation of ransomware as a major danger.

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