Data Breaches Top 600 Year to Date, on Pace to Shatter 2016 Record

By Paul Ausick Updated Jan 12, 12:04PM EST · Published May 12, 10:45AM EDT

Follow 24/7 Wall St. on Google

This post may contain links from our sponsors and affiliates, and Flywheel Publishing may receive compensation for actions taken through them.

Data Breaches Top 600 Year to Date, on Pace to Shatter 2016 Record — © Thinkstock

[cnxvideo id=”507734″ placement=”ros”]The latest count from the Identity Theft Resource Center (ITRC) indicates that there have been 617 data breaches recorded this year through May 10 and that more than 10 million records have been exposed since the beginning of the year. The total represents a 37.7% increase in the number of breaches to date compared with 2016.

In 2016, the ITRC reported a record total of 1,093 breaches and at the current pace that total could rise to around 1,500 in 2017.

President Donald Trump on Thursday signed an executive order calling for modernizing and consolidating federal network technologies and infrastructures, among other things. The administration has been working on the order for several weeks and, according to Dark Reading, the new order “for the most part echoes and builds on the policies of previous administrations.” No surprise, really, because the federal government’s biggest security problem across the board is outdated equipment and networks that are easy targets for attackers.

[nativounit]

The business sector leads them all in the number of records compromised so far in 2017, with more than 8 million exposed records in 346 incidents. That represents 56.1% of the incidents, and nearly 79% of the exposed records so far this year.

The medical/health care sector has posted 22.4% (138) of all data breaches. The number of records exposed in these breaches totaled tops 1.8 million, or about 18.6% of the 2017 total.

The educational sector has experienced 77 data breaches since the beginning of the year. It accounts for 12.5% of all breaches for the year and more than 45,000 exposed records, about 0.5% of the year’s total.

The government/military sector has suffered 32 data breaches to date in 2017, representing about 1.9% of the total number of records exposed and 5.2% of the incidents. More than 190,000 records have been compromised in this sector.

The number of banking/credit/financial sector breaches now totals 24, some 3.9% of the total incidents reported so far this year. 20,000 records have been reported to be compromised in the incidents.

Since beginning to track data breaches in 2005, ITRC had counted 7,515 breaches through May 10, 2017, involving nearly 900 million records.

[wallst_email_signup]

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.