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There have been a total of 568 data breaches recorded so far in 2014 by the Identity Theft Resource Center (ITRC). Just over 75 million records have be exposed, including the breach of 56 million credit and debit card numbers at The Home Depot Inc. (NYSE: HD), the largest breach ever recorded for a retail company.

Home Depot’s exposed card total exceeds the 40 million exposed by the Target Corp. (NYSE: TGT) in the attack against the company during the 2013 holiday shopping season and the 45.6 million card numbers exposed at The TJX Companies Inc. (NYSE: TJX) in a 2007 attack, the largest ever until the Home Depot breach.

The total number of data breaches increased by 22 in the past week and the medical/healthcare sector continues to post the largest percentage of the total breaches, 43.5% (247) out of the total of 568. The number of records exposed in these breaches totaled 7.14 million.

On the basis of the number of records exposed, the business sector accounts for 63 million breached records in 195 incidents.

Banking/credit/financial breaches total 23 incidents involving 172, 320 records, just 4% of the 568 total and less than 1% of the number of records exposed.

A total of 226 breaches to date have involved Social Security numbers and 92 have involved credit or debit cards.

The ITRC notes that 36.1% of the reported number of breaches do not indicate how many records were exposed due to lack of available information.

Since 2005 there have been 4,816 data breaches tabulated involving more than 667 million exposed records.

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