Technology

Data Breach Count Ticks Higher, Still Less Than in 2014

Paul Ausick

Published: November 5, 2015 12:35 pm

Last Updated: January 13, 2020 5:30 pm

The latest account from the Identity Theft Resource Center (ITRC) reports that there has been a total of 641 data breaches recorded through November 3, 2015, and that nearly 176 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 (OPM) in June and 78.8 million health care customer records exposed at Anthem in February.

Speaking of the OPM, the agency’s interim director, Beth Colbert, announced on Wednesday the appointment of Clifton Triplett as a new senior cyber and information technology adviser. Prior to his appointment at OPM, Triplett was a managing partner at SteelPointe Partners, a global management consulting company.

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

• The business sector accounts for about 16 million exposed records in 249 incidents so far in 2015. That represents 38.8% of the incidents and 9.2% of the exposed records.
• The medical/health care sector posted the second-largest percentage of the total breaches so far this year, 36.2% (232) out of the total of 641. The number of records exposed in these breaches totaled nearly 120 million, or 68.3% of the total so far in 2015.
• The number of banking/credit/financial breaches totals 60 for the year to date, unchanged from the prior week, and involves more than 5 million records, some 9.4% of the total number of breaches and 2.9% of the records exposed.
• The government/military sector has suffered 51 data breaches so far this year, up by one from the prior week, representing 8% of the total, and about 19.3% of the total number of records exposed so far this year. Nearly 34 million records have been compromised in the government/military sector to date in 2015.
• The educational sector has seen 49 data breaches in 2015, unchanged for the past five weeks. The sector accounts for 7.6% of all breaches for the year and over 750,000 exposed records, about 0.4% of the total so far in 2015.

In all of 2014, ITRC tracked an annual record number of 783 data breaches, up 27.5% compared with 2013. The previous high was 662 breaches in 2010. Since beginning to track data breaches in 2005, ITRC had counted 5,593 breaches through September 22, 2015, involving nearly 829 million records. Compared with 2014, the number of data breaches to date in 2015 is down by 16 (2.4%) from 657 recorded to the same date last year.

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