UPDATED 06:48 EDT / MARCH 01 2016

NEWS

707 million records stolen in data breaches last year

Last year saw a whopping 707 million private records stolen during 1,673 separate data breaches, according to a new report from Dutch research outfit Gemalto NV.

Gemalto said in its 2015 Breach Level report that this equates to just under 2 million records stolen every single day, or a stunning 22 records stolen per second, over the last year. Of the attacks it considered, some 964 were committed by outside attackers, while 398 occurred due to mistakes from company employees and developers.

Surprisingly, considering that all we ever seem to hear about is the rising incidence of such attacks, Gemalto’s numbers are smaller than in its 2014 report. It said that the total number of attacks fell by 3.4 percent in the last year, while the number of stolen records plummeted by 39 percent.

The biggest breache in the last year took place at the Turkish Citizenship Agency, which was robbed of an embarrassingly high 50 million records. The Korea Pharmaceutical Information Center saw 43 million records tumble into the hands of miscreants, while Office of Personnel Management let slip 22 million records.

Altogether, nation states lost a total of 307 million records, while healthcare providers came in second with 84 million data sets being compromised. In the healthcare industry’s defense however, we should note that a breach at insurance provider Anthem Inc. accounted for a stunning 78.8 million of those 84 million records.

The United States was once again the most targeted nation, with some 1,222 breaches taking place in that country. That compares to just 154 breaches in the U.K., which suffered the second-highest amount, and just 59 incidents in Canada.

In its report, Gemalto says it obtained its data from public sources found online.

Image credit: pixelcreatures via pixabay.com

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