More Than 175 Million Records Exposed in 2015 in 690 Data Breaches

By Paul Ausick Updated Jan 13, 4:45PM EST · Published Nov 25, 1:43PM EST

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More Than 175 Million Records Exposed in 2015 in 690 Data Breaches — © Thinkstock

The latest account from the Identity Theft Resource Center (ITRC) reports that there has been a total of 690 data breaches recorded through November 24, 2015, and that more than 176 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 (OPM) in June and 78.8 million healthcare customer records exposed at Anthem in February.

On Tuesday Amazon.com Inc. (NASDAQ: AMZN) sent an email to an unspecified number of customers letting them know that the company had reset their passwords following a breach that left customers’ passwords exposed. The email indicated that the breach resulted from either improper storage or a transmission snafu. The strong implication is that whatever happened was not Amazon’s fault and that changing customers’ passwords was just precautionary.

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

The business sector accounts for about 16 million exposed records in 271 incidents so far in 2015. That represents 39.3% of the incidents, and 9.2% of the exposed records.

The medical/healthcare sector posted the second-largest percentage of the total breaches so far this year, 35.5% (245) out of the total of 690. The number of records exposed in these breaches totaled nearly 120 million, or 68.1% of the total so far in 2015.
The number of banking/credit/financial breaches totals 63 for the year-to-date and involves more than 5 million records, some 9.1% of the total number of breaches and 2.9% of the records exposed.

The government/military sector has suffered 58 data breaches so far this year, representing about 19.4% of the total number of records exposed so far this year and 8.4% of the incidents. more than 34 million records have been compromised in the government/military sector to date in 2015.

The educational sector has seen 53 data breaches in 2015. The sector accounts for 7.7% of all breaches for the year and nearly 760,000 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% year-over-year compared with 2013. The previous high was 662 breaches in 2010. Since beginning to track data breaches in 2005, ITRC had counted 5,679 breaches through November 10, 2015, involving more than 854 million records. Compared with 2014, the number of data breaches to date in 2015 is down by 18 (2.5%) from 708 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.