541 Data Breaches to Date in 2015 Expose More Than 140 Million Records

By Paul Ausick Updated Apr 27, 3:02PM EDT · Published Sep 10, 1:35PM EDT

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The latest report from the Identity Theft Resource Center (ITRC) reveals that a total of 541 data breaches have been recorded through September 8, 2015, and more than 140 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.

Late last month, PricewaterhouseCoopers released a report on cybersecurity that included data on the information security budgets, which can be summed up as “small and getting smaller.” The report noted, for example, that for businesses with less than $100 million in revenues, security spending in 2014 fell by 20% compared with 2013 spending. Overall, the average spending on information security has hovered around 3.8% of the total IT budget in both 2013 and 2014.

The PwC survey also noted this disturbing result:

Compromises by insiders — current and former employees, as well as third parties with trusted network access — continue to rise, but many organisations have not implemented processes and technologies to address internal incidents. No matter how secure an organisation’s network and data, it will be open to compromise if third parties do not employ equivalent security and privacy safeguards. Another worrisome finding is a diminished commitment to employee training and awareness programmes.

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Here is a rundown of the ITRC report for last week:

The business sector accounts for about 1 million exposed records in 216 incidents so far in 2015. That represents 39.9% of the incidents, but just 0.7% of the exposed records.
The medical/health care sector posted the second-largest percentage of the total breaches so far this year, 34.8% (188) out of the total of 541. The number of records exposed in these breaches totaled nearly 110 million, or 78.3% of the total so far in 2015.
The number of banking/credit/financial breaches totals 52 for the year to date, up from 51 last week, and involves almost 412,000 records, some 9.6% of the total number of breaches and 0.3% of the records exposed.
The government/military sector has suffered 40 data breaches so far this year, unchanged from the prior week, and just 7.7% of the total, but slightly more than 20% of the total number of records exposed. More than 28 million records have been compromised in the government/military sector so far in 2015.
The educational sector has seen 45 data breaches in 2015, also unchanged from the prior week. The sector accounts for 8.3% of all breaches for the year and more than 740,000 exposed records, about 0.5% of the total so far in 2015.

In all of 2014, ITRC tracked an annual record number of 783 data breaches, up 27.5% compared with 2013. The previous high was 662 breaches in 2010. Since beginning to track data breaches in 2005, ITRC had counted 5,562 breaches through September 1, 2015, involving more than 818 million records. Compared with 2014, the number of data breaches is down one from 542 recorded to date last year.

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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.