Technology

Data Breach in Georgia Adds 6 Million Records to Yearly Count

Paul Ausick

Published: November 19, 2015 1:15 pm

Last Updated: January 13, 2020 4:58 pm

The latest account from the Identity Theft Resource Center (ITRC) reports that there has been a total of 669 data breaches recorded through November 18, 2015, and that nearly 182 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.

On Tuesday, two women in Georgia filed a class action suit alleging that a breach of some 6 million records occurred as a result of the release of personally identifiable voter information to third parties that can legally purchase voter information. According to a report at AJC.com, “12 organizations, including statewide political parties, news media organizations and Georgia GunOwner Magazine, received the file.” Georgia’s Secretary of State attributed the data exposure to a clerical error.

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

• The business sector accounts for about 16 million exposed records in 258 incidents so far in 2015. That represents 38.6% of the incidents and 8.9% of the exposed records.
• The medical/health care sector posted the second-largest percentage of the total breaches so far this year, 36% (241) out of the total of 669. The number of records exposed in these breaches totaled nearly 120 million, or 66% of the total so far in 2015.
• The number of banking/credit/financial breaches totals 61 for the year to date and involves more than 5 million records, some 9.1% of the total number of breaches, and 2.89% of the records exposed.
• The government/military sector has suffered 57 data breaches so far this year, representing about 21.9% of the total number of records exposed so far this year and 8.5% of the incidents. Nearly 40 million records have been compromised in the government/military sector to date in 2015.
• The educational sector has seen 52 data breaches in 2015. The sector accounts for 7.8% of all breaches for the year and nearly 760,000 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 5,679 breaches through November 10, 2015, involving nearly 855 million records. Compared with 2014, the number of data breaches to date in 2015 is down by 30 (4.3%) from 699 recorded to the same date last year.

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