Technology
Nearly 400 2017 Data Breaches Have Exposed More Than 7 Million Records
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The latest report from the Identity Theft Resource Center (ITRC) indicates that there have been 392 data breaches recorded this year through March 28, 2017, and that nearly 7.4 million records have been exposed since the beginning of the year. The total represents a 51% increase in the number of breaches to date compared with 2015.
A massive data breach at America’s JobLink (AJL) reported last week exposed personal information on 4.8 million job seekers in 10 states. The exposed information includes the names, Social Security numbers and birth dates of job seekers in Alabama, Arizona, Arkansas, Delaware, Idaho, Illinois, Kansas, Maine, Oklahoma and Vermont.
According to AJL, a hacker exploited a vulnerability in AJL’s application code to get the information. The breach was first noticed on March 12 and confirmed on March 21.
The business sector leads all sectors in the number of records compromised so far in 2017, with more than 5.2 million exposed records in 206 incidents. That represents 52.6% of the incidents, and 71.4% of the exposed records so far in 2017.
The medical/health care sector has posted 24.7% (97) of all data breaches. The number of records exposed in these breaches totaled tops 2 million, or about 27.5% of the 2017 total.
The government/military sector has suffered 20 data breaches to date in 2017, representing about 0.6% of the total number of records exposed and 5.1% of the incidents. More than 44,000 records have been compromised in the government/military sector.
The educational sector has experienced 61 data breaches since the beginning of the year. The sector accounts for 15.6% of all breaches for the year and more than 40,000 exposed records, about 0.5% of the year’s total.
The number of banking/credit/financial sector breaches now totals eight, just 2% of the total incidents reported so far this year. No records have been reported to be compromised in these incidents.
Since beginning to track data breaches in 2005, ITRC had counted 7,291 breaches through March 28, 2017, involving about 889 million records.
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