Press release

Report: Over 36.3% of Australia’s Top Companies Had An Open Data Leak in 2021

UpGuard, the third-party risk and attack surface management platform, today released the ASX 200 Security Report, an analysis of the data security of the top 200 companies in Australia. This research shows that 36.3% of ASX 200 companies surveyed had an open data leak in the past year. A data leak is when sensitive data is accidentally exposed on the Internet. 


For this report, the UpGuard platform collected public data to assess risk factors known to contribute to data breaches. This information is then aggregated and interpreted by an overall security rating. Key insights from the ASX 200 report include:


  • 36.3% of companies surveyed had a live data leak in the past year. Data leaks have increased by 25% in the ASX 200 since 2019
  • Data leaks are growing in smaller companies. While our research shows that a data leak is still more likely to occur at a larger enterprise, data leaks more than doubled in companies that fell in the least valuable quartile examined 
  • More than 50% of companies in the Communication, Telecom, Energy, and Information Technology sectors had data leaks
  • All companies have improved their overall cybersecurity rating, no company has a score below 400 


"Our annual ASX cybersecurity research showed some interesting trends that may be emerging from the effects of remote work and continued digitization,” said Greg Pollock, VP of BreachSight at UpGuard. "The extreme growth in data leaks with smaller organizations but the simultaneous overall improvement in measured security ratings show us that the issue of data security is becoming more acute for all businesses, but that there is relative consensus about the need for better security practices.”


UpGuard’s world class team of cyber researchers and analysts have secured over 2 billion sensitive data leaks for a range of organizations including Facebook, Amazon, GoDaddy and Tesla. Hundreds of companies trust UpGuard with their vendor risk management, including The New York Stock Exchange, Tech Mahindra, the New South Wales Government, Superloop, Aware Super, PagerDuty, USO, and Lendlease. 


The full report is available for download at: https://www.upguard.com/resources/asx-200-security-report


About UpGuard

UpGuard is a cybersecurity platform that helps global organizations prevent data breaches, monitor third-party vendors, and improve their security posture. Using proprietary security ratings, world-class data leak detection capabilities, and powerful remediation workflows, we proactively identify security exposures for companies of all sizes.


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