There have been a total of 621 data breaches recorded so far in 2014 by the Identity Theft Resource Center (ITRC). About 77.89 million records have been exposed, including the breach of 56 million credit and debit card numbers at The Home Depot Inc. (NYSE: HD), the largest breach ever recorded for a retail company.
The total number of data breaches increased by 15 in the week to October 21st and the medical/healthcare sector continues to post the largest percentage of the total breaches, 42.4% (263) out of the total of 621. The number of records exposed in these breaches totaled 7.46 million.
On the basis of the number of records exposed, the business sector accounts for 64.4 million breached records in 215 incidents.
The number of banking/credit/financial breaches remained unchanged for the week at 24 incidents involving 1.17 million records, less than 4% of the 621 total and 1.5% of the number of records exposed.
A total of 250 breaches to date have involved Social Security numbers and 100 have involved credit or debit cards.
Since 2005 there have been 4,869 data breaches tabulated involving just under 670 million exposed records.
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