Technology

Data Breaches Top 600 to Date in 2015

The latest account from the Identity Theft Resource Center (ITRC) reports that there has been a total of 606 data breaches recorded through October 13, 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.

An unknown number of records were breached at America’s Thrift Stores last week. In a statement the company said that only credit card numbers and expiration dates were stolen; no customer specific data, like name and address, were compromised.

E*Trade Financial Corp. (NASDAQ: ETFC) reported that, in 2013, some 31,000 customers may have had some personal information compromised by attackers. Dow Jones News Services also sent a letter to subscribers warning of a data breach between August 2012 and July 2015. The news service had about 2.4 million subscribers, and so far the company has determined that about 3,500 individuals may have been affected.

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

  • The business sector accounts for about 16 million exposed records in 237 incidents so far in 2015. That represents 39.1% of the incidents and 9.1% of the exposed records.
  • The medical/health care sector posted the second-largest percentage of the total breaches so far this year, 35.6% (216) 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 58 for the year to date, up two from the prior week, and involves more than 5 million records, some 9.6% of the total number of breaches and 2.9% of the records exposed.
  • The government/military sector has suffered 46 data breaches so far this year, up by one from the prior week, and representing 7.6% of the total and about 19.3% 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 for the past two weeks. The sector accounts for 8.1% 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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