Technology

489 Data Breaches to Date in 2016

Paul Ausick

Published: June 23, 2016 8:35 am

Last Updated: January 13, 2020 6:29 am

The latest count from the Identity Theft Resource Center (ITRC) indicates that there have been 473 data breaches recorded this year through June 14, 2016, and that nearly 12.7 million records have been exposed since the beginning of the year. The total number of reported breaches increased by 43 in the two weeks since ITRC’s last report.

In the week to June 21, ITRC reported that another 16 breaches had been reported but did not provide details. Including those incidents, the 489 data breaches so far in 2016 are 20% higher than for the same period a year ago.

Network security website Krebs on Security reported on Wednesday that remote-login service GoToMyPC is forcing all its users to change their passwords. The service, owned by Citrix Systems Inc. (NASDAQ: CTXS), cited a recent spike in attacks targeting passwords re-used at multiple sites as the reason for the order. The company also said that there is no indication that any data were compromised. The security website’s founder, Brian Krebs, noted: “Re-using passwords at multiple sites is a bad idea to begin with, but re-using your GoToMyPC remote administrator password at other sites seems like an exceptionally lousy idea.”

The number of breaches in 2015 totaled 781, just two shy of the record 783 breaches that ITRC tracked in 2014. The 473 data breaches reported through June 14, 2016, are 16% more than the 408 reported for the same period last year. A total of more than 169 million records were exposed in 2015.

Here’s a rundown of the latest ITRC detailed report:

• The government/military sector retained the lead in the number of records exposed in 2016. The sector has suffered 27 data breaches so far this year, representing about 44.4% of the total number of records exposed and 5.7% of the incidents. More than 5.6 million records have been compromised in the government/military sector to date in 2016.
• The business sector accounts for nearly 2.4 million exposed records in 220 incidents. That represents 46.5% of the incidents and 18.9% of the exposed records.
• The medical/health care sector has posted 33.4% (158) of all data breaches to date this year. The number of records exposed in these breaches totaled nearly 4.3 million, or about 33.4% of the total so far in 2016.
• The number of banking/credit/financial breaches totals 13 for the year to date and involves more than 5,200 records, some 2.7% of the total number of breaches and less than 0.1% of the records exposed.
• The educational sector has seen 55 data breaches in 2016. The sector accounts for 11.6% of all breaches for the year and more than 366,000 exposed records, about 2.9% of the total so far this year.

Since beginning to track data breaches in 2005, ITRC had counted 6,300 breaches through June 21, 2016, involving more than 862 million records.