More Than 300 Data Breaches to Date in 2017

March 15, 2017 by Paul Ausick

The latest count from the Identity Theft Resource Center (ITRC) reports that there have been 312 data breaches recorded this year through March 14, 2017, and that over 1.3 million records have been exposed since the beginning of the year.

VisionQuest Eyecare in Indiana reported a data breach on March 2 that affected some 86,000 individual records. This was the largest incident reported so far in 2017, but the company has not revealed any further details about the event.

At the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services (HHS) breach portal, there is an entry for Commonwealth Health Corporation (Kentucky) indicating nearly 700,000 individuals have been affected by a theft of data, but no additional details are available for this incident.

The medical/health care sector leads all sectors in the number of records compromised so far in 2017. The sector posted 25.3% (79) of all data breaches. The number of records exposed in these breaches tops 740,000, or about 57.2% of the 2017 total.

The business sector accounts for more than 470,000 exposed records in 155 incidents. That represents 49.7% of the incidents and 36.4% of the exposed records so far in 2017.

The educational sector has experienced 54 data breaches since the beginning of the year. The sector accounts for 17.3% of all breaches for the year and nearly 40,000 exposed records, about 3% of the year’s total.

The government/military sector has suffered 19 data breaches to date in 2017, representing about 3.4% of the total number of records exposed and 6.1% of the incidents. More than 43,000 records have been compromised in the government/military sector.

The number of banking/credit/financial sector breaches now totals five, just 1.6% of the total incidents reported so far this year. No records have been reported to be compromised in the five incidents.

Since beginning to track data breaches in 2005, ITRC had counted 7,139 breaches through February 28, 2017, involving nearly 889 million records.

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