Data breach numbers climbing for 2016

Eddie Bauer reported last week that its point-of-sale systems at the company’s retail stores were compromised in a malware attack that enabled “unauthorized parties” to gain access to payment card information. Transactions with the company’s online store were not affected by the breach. The announcement from Eddie Bauer comes just a few days after an announced breach at Oracle Corp. No estimates were given for the number of records that may have been compromised, but the system has more than 300,000 business customers.

The latest data breach count from the Identity Theft Resource Center (ITRC) reports that there have been over 600 data breaches recorded this year and that more than 21 million records have been exposed since the beginning of the year. The number of breaches in 2015 totaled 781, just two shy of the record 783 breaches that ITRC tracked in 2014. The data breaches reported so far for 2016 are more than 14 percent above the number reported (511) for the same period last year. A total of more than 169 million records were exposed in 2015.

Here’s a breakdown of the ITRC report for last week:

• The medical/health care sector now leads all sectors in the number of records compromised to date in 2016. The sector has posted 36.1 percent (217) of all data breaches so far this year. The number of records exposed in these breaches totaled more than 12 million, or about 59.2 percent of the total so far in 2016.
• The government/military sector has suffered 38 data breaches so far this year, representing about 27.1 percent of the total number of records exposed and 6.3 percent of the incidents. More than 5.7 million records in the government/military sector have been compromised to date in 2016.
• The business sector accounts for nearly 2.5 million exposed records in 264 incidents. That represents 43.9 percent of the incidents, and 11.8 percent of the exposed records.
• The number of banking/credit/financial breaches totals 20 for the year to date and involves nearly 5,300 records, some 3.3 percent of the total number of breaches and less than 0.1 percent of the records exposed.
• The educational sector has seen 62 data breaches in 2016. The sector accounts for 10.3 percent of all breaches for the year and more than 400,000 exposed records, about 1.9 percent of the total so far this year.

Since beginning to track data breaches in 2005, ITRC has recorded 6,411 breaches through August 2, 2016, involving more than 870 million records. For more details, read 247WallSt.com.