Technology
2016 Data Breaches Added 5 Million Exposed Records Last Week
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The latest count from the Identity Theft Resource Center (ITRC) reports that a total of 247 data breaches have been recorded through April 12, 2016, and that more than 11.25 million records have been exposed since the beginning of the year. The total number of reported breaches increased by 20 compared to the prior week.
A February theft of a laptop computer and several hard drives from a federal office building in the state of Washington in February was just added to the ITRC list. The stolen goods may have contained as many as 5 million names and Social Security numbers. Two individuals have been arrested, according to Becker’s Hospital Review.
The number of breaches in 2015 totaled 781, just two shy of the record 783 breaches that ITRC tracked in 2014. The 247 data breaches reported so far for 2016 are more than 12% higher than the number reported for the same period last year. A total of more than 169 million records were exposed in 2015.
Here’s a rundown of the ITRC report for last week:
Since beginning to track data breaches in 2005, ITRC had counted 5,810 breaches through December 2015, involving nearly 848 million records.
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