155 Million Records Breached So Far in 2015

The total number of records breached for the year to date includes 4.5 million added in this report as a result of the Office of Personnel Management (OPM) announcement two weeks ago 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.

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

• The business sector accounts for about 1 million exposed records in 226 incidents so far in 2015. That represents 39.2% of the incidents, but just 0.6% of the exposed records.
• The medical/health care sector posted the second-largest percentage of the total breaches so far this year, 35.7% (206) out of the total of 577. The number of records exposed in these breaches totaled nearly 120 million, or 76.9% of the total so far in 2015.
• The number of banking/credit/financial breaches totals 53 for the year to date, the same as the prior week, and involves almost 412,000 records, some 9.2% of the total number of breaches and 0.3% of the records exposed.
• The government/military sector has suffered 43 data breaches so far this year, up by two from the prior week, and 7.5% of the total, and slightly less than 22% of the total number of records exposed so far this year. Nearly 34 million records have been compromised in the government/military sector to date in 2015.
• The educational sector has seen 49 data breaches in 2015, up one compared with the prior week. The sector accounts for 8.5% of all breaches for the year and over 750,000 exposed records, or 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 by 16 (2.7%) from 593 recorded to the same date last year.

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