Technology

Data Breaches Continue to Plague Democrats

Paul Ausick

Published: August 4, 2016 10:55 am

Last Updated: January 13, 2020 4:55 am

More hacking attacks against various arms of the Democratic Party came to light last week. The party’s Democratic Congressional Campaign Committee’s (DCCC) systems were breached, and U.S. security officials attributed the break-in to Russian intelligence services. Similar attacks resulted in the release two weeks ago of 20,000 Democratic National Committee (DNC) emails and cost Florida Congresswoman Debbie Wasserman Schultz her job as DNC chair.

The latest data breach count from the Identity Theft Resource Center (ITRC) reports that there have been 572 data breaches recorded this year through August 2, 2016, and that nearly 13.5 million records have been exposed since the beginning of the year. The total number of reported breaches increased by 34 since ITRC’s last report.

The number of breaches in 2015 totaled 781, just two shy of the record 783 breaches that ITRC tracked in 2014. The 572 data breaches reported so far for 2016 are nearly 16% more than the number reported (495) for the same period last year. A total of more than 169 million records were exposed in 2015.

None of the breaches of Democratic party systems is included in this week’s report.

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

• The government/military sector retained the lead in the number of records exposed in 2016. The sector has suffered 35 data breaches so far this year, representing about 41.8% of the total number of records exposed and 6.1% 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 2.5 million exposed records in 254 incidents. That represents 44.4% of the incidents and 18.4% of the exposed records.
• The medical/health care sector has posted 36% (206) of all data breaches to date this year. The number of records exposed in these breaches totaled nearly 5 million, or about 36.8% of the total so far in 2016.
• The number of banking/credit/financial breaches totals 16 for the year to date and involves nearly 5,300 records, some 2.8% of the total number of breaches and less than 0.1% of the records exposed.
• The educational sector has seen 61 data breaches in 2016. The sector accounts for 10.7% of all breaches for the year and more than 400,000 exposed records, about 3% of the total so far this year.

Since beginning to track data breaches in 2005, ITRC had counted 6,382 breaches through August 2, 2016, involving more than 864 million records.