Technology

2016 Data Breaches Off Last Year's Near-Record Pace

Paul Ausick

Published: February 3, 2016 11:50 am

Last Updated: January 13, 2020 1:41 pm

The latest count from the Identity Theft Resource Center (ITRC) reports that there has been a total of 53 data breaches recorded through February 2, 2016, and that more than a million records have been exposed since the beginning of the year. The largest data breach to date was reported by Centene Corp. (NYSE: CNC) and involved medical information on 950,000 subscribers to the company’s health insurance products. The data were stored on six hard drives that are currently unaccounted for.

The total number of breaches in 2015 came in at 781, just two shy of the record 783 breaches that ITRC tracked in 2014. The 52 data breaches reported so far for 2016 are well off the 69 reported for the same period last year.

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

• The medical/health care sector posted the largest percentage of the total breaches so far this year, 39.6% (21). The number of records exposed in these breaches totaled is more than 1.1 million, or 82.7% of the total so far in 2016.
• The business sector accounts for over 82,000 exposed records in 19 incidents so far in 2016. That represents 35.8% of the incidents and 6.1% of the exposed records.
• The number of banking/credit/financial breaches totals three for the year to date and involves more than 4,000 records, some 5.7% of the total number of breaches and 0.3% of the records exposed.
• The government/military sector has suffered three data breaches so far this year, representing about 0.1% of the total number of records exposed so far this year and 5.7% of the incidents. More than 1,000 records have been compromised in the government/military sector to date in 2016.
• The educational sector has seen seven data breaches in 2016. The sector accounts for 13.2% of all breaches for the year and more than 140,000 exposed records, about 10.7% of the total so far this year.

A total of more than 169 million records were exposed in the 781 data breaches ITRC tracked in 2015. Since beginning to track data breaches in 2005, ITRC had counted 5,810 breaches through December 2015, involving more than 856 million records.