The Identity Theft Resource Center (ITRC) Data Breach report has recently been published. The ITRC have been tracking security breaches in the United States since 2005, looking for patterns, new trends and any information that help the wider community to educate consumers and businesses on the need for understanding the value of protecting personal identifying information.
Published on the 8th September 2016, headlines included the total number of reported breaches recorded across all sectors was 657 compared to 781 the year previous. Great news? That’s still 28,648,522 compromised consumer records.
Unsurprisingly, the sector with the least number of breacheswas Banking/Credit/Financial with a total of 21 for the reported period.
The sector that reported the largest number of compromises was Medical/Healthcare with 47% (13,459,107) of all breaches. Some of the largest individual breaches in this sector included Centene Corporation, a Fortune 500 healthcare enterprise, which exposed 950,000 records, Banner Health who compromised 3.7 million records and Newkirk Products who compromised 3.3 million records.
One of the latest reported incidents was Providence Health & Services breached by an employee. Reported on 18th July in the Becker's Hospital Health IT & CIO review, “Potentially compromised information includes demographic and medical treatment information.” Following an audit, it was found that the insider accessed health records between July 2012 and April 2016
Since 2005, the ITRC has recorded 6,467 breaches exposing a total of 879,889,874 records across Banking/Credit/Financial, Business, Educational, Government/Military and Medical/Healthcare sectors.