The latest account from the Identity Theft Resource Center (ITRC) reports that there has been a total of 620 data breaches recorded through October 21, 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.

Brian Krebs, who operates the KrebsOnSecurity website, has an interesting report this week on the company that is the Internet’s most spam-friendly service provider. That would be International Business Machines Corp. (NYSE: IBM), by way of its ownership of a cloud computing company named Softlayer. IBM acquired the company in 2013.

According to the Spamhaus Project, an international nonprofit group based in Switzerland, as of October 22, Softlayer has 685 current spam issues. According to Spamhaus, Softlayer and the other nine listed Internet service providers on its world’s worst list, “knowingly provide service to spam gangs and ignore spam reports from anti-spam systems and internet users.” Number 4 on the list is Softbank’s Japanese ISP softbank.co.jp.

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

• The business sector accounts for about 16 million exposed records in 242 incidents so far in 2015. That represents 39% 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% (221) out of the total of 620. 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 60 for the year to date, up two from the prior week, and involves more than 5 million records, some 9.7% of the total number of breaches and 2.9% of the records exposed.
• The government/military sector has suffered 48 data breaches so far this year, also up by two from the prior week, representing 7.7% 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 three weeks. The sector accounts for 7.9% 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 10 (1.6%) from 630 recorded to the same date last year.

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