The number of data breaches this year so far has dropped by 33 percent, with 544 incidents reported so far, according to CNBC. Further, the number of people who've been affected by data breaches has gone down by 66 percent. This might seem counterintuitive, given the mass migration to the internet in the wake of the pandemic, but CNBC said that this mass migration is actually the very reason that breaches have dropped.

As people and businesses began increasingly relying upon online communications, they did so cognizant of the risks, and apparently became much more vigilant than before. Organizations have been on high alert since the pandemic, and have warned their teams about phishing attacks and other activities that might lead to a breach, said Eva Velasquez, president and CEO of the Identity Theft Resource Center, who was quoted in the article She also said that another factor is that, since so much more work is performed online rather than in an office, internal bad actors don't have as much access to systems data that they would have had before.

Yet Velasquez also proffered a darker explanation: Data breaches have gone down because fraudsters already have the information they need from previous hacks, which would explain the sudden influx of coronavirus scams. This would mean, for now, that they're focused more on using the data they've already got than going out and finding new data. So the decrease in breaches might represent more of a lull than a new way of operating, and once the information that data thieves currently have becomes out of date, new breaches might occur.