175 Million Records Breached to Date in 2015

By Paul Ausick Updated Apr 27, 2:49PM EDT · Published Oct 8, 1:15PM EDT

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The latest account from the Identity Theft Resource Center (ITRC) indicates that there has been a total of 591 data breaches recorded through October 6, 2015, and that more than 175 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.

Nearly 20 million records were added to the week’s report, based on 4.6 million records exposed at online brokerage Scottrade and 15 million records exposed at credit report provider Experian. The Experian release was restricted to customers of T-Mobile who had applied for credit from the wireless carrier. October is National Cybersecurity Awareness Month, and off to a great start.

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

The business sector accounts for about 16 million exposed records in 230 incidents so far in 2015. That represents 38.9% of the incidents and 9.2% of the exposed records. Last week’s report of the incident at Experian added 15 million records to the business sector total in just one week.
The medical/health care sector posted the second-largest percentage of the total breaches so far this year, 35.7% (211) out of the total of 591. The number of records exposed in these breaches totaled nearly 120 million, or 68.3% of the total so far in 2015.
The number of banking/credit/financial breaches totals 56 for the year to date, up three from the prior week, and involves just over 5 million records, some 9.5% of the total number of breaches, and 2.9% of the records exposed. The reported incident at Scottrade added 4.6 million to this week’s sector total.
The government/military sector has suffered 45 data breaches so far this year, up by two from the prior week, and representing 7.6% of the total and about 19% 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, unchanged compared with the prior week. The sector accounts for 8.3% of all breaches for the year and over 750,000 exposed records, about 0.4% 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 13 (2.2%) from 604 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.