Data Breach Tally Climbing

As of November 1, 2007, the Privacy Rights Clearinghouse has estimated that 167,706,372 million records containing sensitive personal information have been breached since January 10, 2005. Averaged per day during this time period, 163,776 records are breached every day.

A table of data breaches:

The largest data breach on record is that of TJX (45.7 million records), but such large figures are not as common as the continuous smaller data breaches happening daily around the world. We become desensitized to the news unless it reaches such record numbers, but if you look at the total data breach tally and the daily average, you can gain some valuable perspective on how large the issue really is.

According to the Privacy Rights Clearinghouse stats as analyzed by etiolated.org, some industries are faring better than others. The Education field is still on an upward trend regarding number of data breach incidents (not records), while Government appears to have made some improvements. However, if you consider the table above, its the records stolen that form the most alarming figures. The data shows that, on average, more data is being breached per breach incident than ever before.

2007 is going to be a record year for data breaches. And this is one record you don’t want to win.

Tags: data breach, data breaches, records lost, stolen, identity theft, id theft, security breach