Technology

Data Breaches Expose Nearly 140 Million Records

Computer Password
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The latest report from the Identity Theft Resource Center (ITRC) reveals that there has been a total of 472 data breaches recorded through August 11, 2015, and more than 139 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.

A June report by cybersecurity firm Trustwave said that of the 574 hacking incidents and data breaches the company was asked to investigate in 2014, 43% came in the retail industry, 13% came from the food and beverage industry and 12% from the hospitality industry. More striking, perhaps: 81% of victims did not discover on their own that they had been hacked. In cases where a company discovers the attack on its own, it takes about two weeks to stop it. When companies do not run their own security programs, it takes more than five months to contain the breach.

E-commerce sites were compromised in 42% of attacks and point-of-sales systems were hit in 40%. The totals were up 7% and 13%, respectively, from 2013.

The total number of data breaches increased by six in the week, according to the ITRC. The business sector accounts for about 645,000 exposed records in 184 incidents so far in 2015. That represents 39% of the incidents, but just 0.5% of the exposed records.

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The medical/health care sector posted the second-largest percentage of the total breaches so far this year, 35.6% (168) out of the total of 472. The number of records exposed in these breaches totaled 109.5 million, or 78.6% of the total so far in 2015.

The number of banking/credit/financial breaches totals 45 for the year to date and involves more than 411,000 records, some 9.7% of the total number of breaches and 0.3% of the records exposed. These numbers are unchanged from the prior week.

The government/military sector has suffered 36 data breaches so far this year, just 7.7% of the total, but about 20% of the total number of records exposed. These numbers were also unchanged from the prior week.

The educational sector has seen 39 data breaches in 2015, accounting for 8.3% of all breaches for the year. Nearly 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 2.3% lower to date in 2015.

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