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It’s been another rough year for netizens. Many different groups of attackers utilized many different avenues in order to help part the innocent from their money and their data, with the two being almost synonymous at this point. Once again, like in 2014 (and as we have predicted for 2016), major breaches filled media headlines costing victims hundreds of millions of dollars.

Malicious and unwanted email traffic has remained steady during the second quarter of 2015, having accounted for over 81 percent of all traffic as seen by AppRiver filters. The second quarter of 2015 has given us even more accounts of large scale breaches, not just retailers, but by password management companies and large government agencies. According to the Ponemon Institute's 2015 Global Cost of Data Breach Study, the average cost of each one of these breaches has reached record levels of $3.8 million.

Once again it was another busy year in the cyber security realm. We certainly saw our fair share of what has become commonplace attacks from botnets such as Zeus and Asprox as they attempt to spread spam and malware campaigns ad infinitum and attempt to build their numbers at the same time. We also saw some activity in the geo-political side as apparent hacktivists and nation states conducted cyber-attacks against their marks. However, one topic was certainly discussed above all else and that was the massive amount of data breaches that occurred during the year.