Over 150 Million Records Breached to Date in 2015

By Paul Ausick Updated Apr 28, 3:20AM EDT · Published Sep 24, 1:25PM EDT

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The latest account from the Identity Theft Resource Center (ITRC) reports that there has been a total of 563 data breaches recorded through September 22, 2015, and that more than 150 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.

The Office of Personnel Management (OPM) announced on Wednesday that it had underestimated the number of fingerprint records that were released in the data breach that resulted in the disclosure of 21.5 million personal records. The OPM increased the number of individuals whose fingerprint data was compromised from 1.1 million to approximately 5.6 million. The total is a subset of the same 21.5 million records that were exposed.

The OPM’s press release said:

Federal experts believe that, as of now, the ability to misuse fingerprint data is limited. However, this probability could change over time as technology evolves. Therefore, an interagency working group with expertise in this area — including the FBI, DHS, DOD, and other members of the Intelligence Community — will review the potential ways adversaries could misuse fingerprint data now and in the future. This group will also seek to develop potential ways to prevent such misuse. If, in the future, new means are developed to misuse the fingerprint data, the government will provide additional information to individuals whose fingerprints may have been stolen in this breach.

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Here’s a rundown of the ITRC report for last week:

The business sector accounts for about 1 million exposed records in 222 incidents so far in 2015. That represents 39.4% 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, 35.3% (199) out of the total of 563. The number of records exposed in these breaches totaled nearly 120 million, or 79.8% of the total so far in 2015.
The number of banking/credit/financial breaches totals 53 for the year to date, up one from last week, and involves almost 412,000 records, some 9.4% of the total number of breaches and 0.3% of the records exposed.
The government/military sector has suffered 41 data breaches so far this year, unchanged from a week ago, and 7.3% of the total, but slightly less than 19% of the total number of records exposed so far this year. More than 28 million records have been compromised in the government/military sector to date in 2015.
The educational sector has seen 48 data breaches in 2015, up two from the prior week. The sector accounts for 8.5% of all breaches for the year and over 750,000 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 5,593 breaches through September 22, 2015, involving nearly 829 million records. Compared with 2014, the number of data breaches to date in 2015 is down 18 (3.1%) from 581 recorded to the same 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.