Every day is a game of Russian roulette

Compiled by Crystal Hartman

DATA, AS WE at ACDS have noted over and over, is increasingly the basis for sound and strategic business decisions. But data doesn’t have to be the sole province of business; we can draw on it to improve our personal lives as well. So this month, in observance of Cybersecurity Awareness, we’re introducing a new feature that we’ve been mulling for a while—The ACDS Index, a compendium of thematically related pieces of data that cumulatively tell a story… or at least provide a reality check. Cyber safety and cybersecurity aren’t the same thing, but habitual diligence in the former may help lead to the latter. Read on, and see how much of yourself you find reflected in these numbers.

• Percentage of passwords that contain personal information, such as birthday or name: 59 Source:

Source: Google

• Percentage of Americans who say they would change an online account password if they discovered it had been breached: 45

Source: Google

• Number of times longer a 12-character password takes to crack versus a 6-character one: 62 trillion

(To put it in perspective, if a given computer could crack the six-character password in one second, it would still take more than two million years to crack the 12-character password)

Source: Scientific American

• Percentage of attacks blocked by Multi-Factor Authentication (MFA): 99.9

Source: Microsoft

• Chance that a mobile device has at least one high-risk app installed: 1 in 36

Source: Symantec

• Total dollar amount that Americans lost due to COVID-19 and stimulus check scams: $97.39M

Source: atlasVPN

• Percentage of employees citing distraction as the reason for falling for a phishing scam while working from home: 47

Source: Tessian

• Number of new phishing websites that Google detected in 2020: 2.02 million, or an average of 46,000 per week

Source: Google

• Number of data records compromised every second: 80, or 7 million daily

Source: Legal Jobs

• Number of identity theft reports received by the U.S. Federal Trade Commission in 2020: 1.4 million

Source: Security Magazine

• Average percentage of companies’ folders that are properly protected: 5

Source: Varonis

• Number of days the average organization takes to detect and contain a breach caused by a malicious attack: 315

Source: IBM’s Cost of a Data Breach Report 2020

• Percentage of cybersecurity breaches caused by human error: 95

Source: Cybint

• Percentage of businesses that find the cost of staying ahead of cyber criminals unsustainable: 69

Source: Accenture