2017 Data Breaches Total Continues Climb, Up 24% Year Over Year

By Paul Ausick Updated Jan 12, 9:00AM EST · Published Aug 18, 9:40AM EDT

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2017 Data Breaches Total Continues Climb, Up 24% Year Over Year — © Thinkstock

The latest count from the Identity Theft Resource Center (ITRC) is that there have been 917 data breaches recorded this year through August 16 and that nearly 17 million records have been exposed since the beginning of the year. The incident total is 24% higher than at the same time last year.

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.

On Thursday, a Nebraska-based voting software company confirmed a leak of 1.8 million Chicago voter records according to a report at WGNTV website. The leaked data included names, addresses, birthdates, partial Social Security numbers and some other personally identifiable data. The breach was first identified by data security firm UpGuard and resulted from a misconfigured Amazon Web Services S3 database, an issue that has surfaced several times in the past few months.

The business sector leads them all in the number of records compromised so far in 2017, with more than 9.2 million exposed records in 488 incidents. That represents 53.2% of the incidents, and 54.6% of the exposed records so far this year.

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The medical/health care sector has posted 25.3% (232) of all 2017 data breaches. The number of records exposed in these breaches totals over 3.5 million, or about 20.8% of the 2017 total.

The educational sector has experienced 96 data breaches since the beginning of the year. The sector accounts for 10.5% of all breaches for the year and more than 1.1 million exposed records, about 6.6% of the year’s total.

The government/military sector has suffered 45 data breaches to date in 2017, representing about 1.5% of the total number of records exposed and 4.9% of the incidents. More than 250,000 records have been compromised in the sector.

The number of banking/credit/financial sector breaches now totals 56, some 6.1% of the total incidents reported so far this year. More than 2.7 million records have been reported to be compromised in the incidents.

Since beginning to track data breaches in 2005, ITRC had counted 7,815 breaches through August 2, 2017, involving nearly 905 million records.

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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.