The latest report from the Identity Theft Resource Center (ITRC) reveals that there has been a total of 519 data breaches recorded through August 25, 2015, and nearly 140 million records have been exposed. The annual total includes 21.5 million records exposed in the attack on the U.S. Office of Personnel Management in June and 78.8 million health care customer records exposed at Anthem in February.

Recent research by NuData Security indicates that personally identifiable information remains more popular as a target of fraudsters than credit card information. The company analyzed nearly 500 million account creation events in the three-month period to July and found that more than 57% were flagged as either high-risk or fraudulent, up from 28% in the prior three-month period through April. Almost half of account creation fraud attempted in May was linked to delivering false product ratings.

According to NuData, the top six country sources of malicious behavior are China, the United States, Saudi Arabia, the United Kingdom, Malaysia and Brazil.

Last week, the total number of data breaches increased by 25 in the week, according to the ITRC. The business sector accounts for about 905,000 exposed records in 206 incidents so far in 2015. That represents 39.7% of the incidents, but just 0.6% of the exposed records.

The medical/health care sector posted the second-largest percentage of the total breaches so far this year, 34.9% (181) out of the total of 519. The number of records exposed in these breaches totaled 109.7 million, or 78.4% of the total so far in 2015.

The number of banking/credit/financial breaches totals 47 for the year to date, unchanged from last week, and involves more than 411,000 records, some 9.1% of the total number of breaches and 0.3% of the records exposed.

The government/military sector has suffered 40 data breaches so far this year, just 7.7% of the total, but slightly more than 20% of the total number of records exposed. Nearly 110 million records have been compromised in the government/military sector so far in 2015.

The educational sector has seen 45 data breaches in 2015, accounting for 8.7% of all breaches for the year. More than 740,000 records have been exposed, about 0.5% of the total so far in 2015.

In all of 2014, ITRC tracked an annual record number of 783 data breaches, up 27.5% year over year. The previous high was 662 breaches in 2010. Since beginning to track data breaches in 2005, ITRC had counted 5,497 breaches through August 11, 2015, involving more than 818 million records. Compared with 2014, the number of data breaches is about 1.4% higher to date in 2015.

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