More Than 135 Million Records Breached So Far in 2015

By Paul Ausick Updated Apr 28, 1:59AM EDT · Published Jul 23, 2:05PM EDT

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The latest report from the Identity Theft Resource Center (ITRC) reveals that there has been a record total of 436 data breaches recorded through July 21, 2015, and more than 135 million records have been exposed. The annual total includes 21.5 million records exposed in the attack on the U.S. Office of Personnel Management in June and 78.8 million health care customer records exposed at Anthem in February

In all of 2014, ITRC tracked an annual record number of 783 data breaches, up 27.5% year-over-year compared with 2013. The previous high was 662 breaches in 2010. Since beginning to track data breaches in 2005, ITRC had counted 5,029 breaches through the end of 2014, involving more than 675 million records. Compared with 2014, the number of data breaches is less than 1% higher to date.

In 2014 hacking attacks accounted for 21.7% of all data breaches. In the first half of 2015, hacking accounted for 24.3% of all breaches (97 total) and the exposure of about 7.2 million records.

The total number of data breaches increased by 12 in the week and the medical/health care sector continues to post the largest percentage of the total breaches, 42.2% (304) out of the total of 708. The number of records exposed in these breaches totaled 7.94 million.

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On the basis of the number of records exposed, the business sector accounts for about 548,000 breached records in 175 incidents so far in 2015.

The number of banking/credit/financial breaches totals 41 for the year to date and involves more than 408,000 records, some 9.4% of the total number of breaches and 0.3% of the records exposed.

The government/military sector has suffered 32 data breaches so far this year, just 7.3% of the total, but nearly 21% of the total number of records exposed.

The medical/health care sector has had 153 data breaches to date this year, accounting for 35.1% of the total. The number of records exposed totals more than 105 million, 78.1% of the total to date.

About the Author Paul Ausick →

Paul Ausick has been writing for a673b.bigscoots-temp.com for more than a decade. He has written extensively on investing in the energy, defense, and technology sectors. In a previous life, he wrote technical documentation and managed a marketing communications group in Silicon Valley.

He has a bachelor's degree in English from the University of Chicago and now lives in Montana, where he fishes for trout in the summer and stays inside during the winter.