Data Breaches Up 24% to Date in 2016

The latest count from the Identity Theft Resource Center (ITRC) reports that there have been 378 data breaches recorded this year through May 10, 2016, and that more than 11.5 million records have been exposed since the beginning of the year. The total number of reported breaches increased by 30 compared to the prior week.

The Washington Post last week reported that the Federal Deposit Insurance Corp. (FDIC) retroactively reported five “major incident” data breaches that have occurred since October 30. 2016. In all cases the data breaches involved employees with legitimate access to personally identifiable information downloaded the data along with their own personal data when they were leaving the agency. All five signed affidavits declaring that they had not shared the data.

The number of breaches in 2015 totaled 781, just two shy of the record 783 breaches that ITRC tracked in 2014. The 378 data breaches reported so far for 2016 are 24% more than the number reported for the same period last year. A total of more than 169 million records were exposed in 2015.

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

• The government/military sector retained the lead in the number of records exposed in 2016. The sector has suffered 18 data breaches so far this year, representing about 45.2% of the total number of records exposed and 4.8% of the incidents. More than 5.2 million records have been compromised in the government/military sector to date in 2016.
• The medical/health care sector has posted 34.9% (122) of all data breaches to date this year. The number of records exposed in these breaches totaled more than 4 million.
• The business sector accounts for more than 1.9 million exposed records in 187 incidents. That represents 49.5% of the incidents and 17% of the exposed records.
• The number of banking/credit/financial breaches totals nine for the year to date and involves nearly 5,000 records, some 2.4% of the total number of breaches and less than 0.1% of the records exposed.
• The educational sector has seen 42 data breaches in 2016. The sector accounts for 11.1% of all breaches for the year and more than 325,000 exposed records, about 2.8% of the total so far this year.

Since beginning to track data breaches in 2005, ITRC had counted 6,079 breaches through April 18, 2016, involving more than 862 million records.