Data breach trends

Are data breaches becoming more or less common? This post gives a crude, back-of-the-envelope calculation to address the question. We won't look at number of breaches per se but number of records breached.

There's a terrific visualization of data breach statistics at Information is Beautiful, and they share their data here. Note that the data only includes breaches of over 30,000 records.

By using their data, we can look at the total number of records breached each year. The figure for 2019 is projected: since the data stop in June of this year, I've assumed there will be as many breaches in the second half of 2019 as the first half.

Note that records breached is measured in billions.

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