In 2023, the number of data compromises in the United States stood at 3,205 cases. Meanwhile, over 353 million individuals were affected in the same year by data compromises, including data breaches, leakage, and exposure. While these are three different events, they have one thing in common. As a result of all three incidents, the sensitive data is accessed by an unauthorized threat actor. Industries most vulnerable to data breaches Some industry sectors usually see more significant cases of private data violations than others. This is determined by the type and volume of the personal information organizations of these sectors store. In 2022, healthcare, financial services, and manufacturing were the three industry sectors that recorded most data breaches. The number of healthcare data breaches in the United States has gradually increased within the past few years. In the financial sector, data compromises increased almost twice between 2020 and 2022, while manufacturing saw an increase of more than three times in data compromise incidents. Largest data exposures worldwide In 2020, an adult streaming website, CAM4, experienced a leakage of nearly 11 billion records. This, by far, is the most extensive reported data leakage. This case, though, is unique because cyber security researchers found the vulnerability before the cyber criminals. The second-largest data breach is the Yahoo data breach, dating back to 2013. The company first reported about one billion exposed records, then later, in 2017, came up with an updated number of leaked records, which was three billion. In March 2018, the third biggest data breach happened, involving India’s national identification database Aadhaar. As a result of this incident, over 1.1 billion records were exposed.

Analysis of ‘List of Top Data Breaches (2004 - 2021)’ provided by Analyst-2 (analyst-2.ai), based on source dataset retrieved from https://www.kaggle.com/hishaamarmghan/list-of-top-data-breaches-2004-2021 on 14 February 2022.

--- Dataset description provided by original source is as follows ---

This is a dataset containing all the major data breaches in the world from 2004 to 2021

As we know, there is a big issue related to the privacy of our data. Many major companies in the world still to this day face this issue every single day. Even with a great team of people working on their security, many still suffer. In order to tackle this situation, it is only right that we must study this issue in great depth and therefore I pulled this data from Wikipedia to conduct data analysis. I would encourage others to take a look at this as well and find as many insights as possible.

This data contains 5 columns: 1. Entity: The name of the company, organization or institute 2. Year: In what year did the data breach took place 3. Records: How many records were compromised (can include information like email, passwords etc.) 4. Organization type: Which sector does the organization belong to 5. Method: Was it hacked? Were the files lost? Was it an inside job?

Here is the source for the dataset: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_data_breaches

Here is the GitHub link for a guide on how it was scraped: https://github.com/hishaamarmghan/Data-Breaches-Scraping-Cleaning

--- Original source retains full ownership of the source dataset ---

As of 2024, the average cost of a data breach in the United States amounted to 9.36 million U.S. dollars, down from 9.48 million U.S. dollars in the previous year. The global average cost per data breach was 4.88 million U.S. dollars in 2024. Cost of a data breach in different countries worldwide Data breaches impose a big threat for organizations globally. The monetary damage caused by data breaches has increased in many markets in the past decade. In 2023, Canada followed the U.S. by data breach costs, with an average of 5.13 million U.S. dollars. Since 2019, the average monetary damage caused by loss of sensitive information in Canada has increased notably. In the United Kingdom, the average cost of a data breach in 2024 amounted to around 4.53 million U.S. dollars, while in Germany it stood at 5.31 million U.S. dollars. The cost of data breach by industry and segment Data breach costs vary depending on the industry and segment. For the fourth consecutive year, the global healthcare sector registered the highest costs of data breach, which in 2024 amounted to about nine million U.S. dollars. Financial institutions ranked second, with an average cost of six million U.S. dollars for a data breach. Detection and escalation was the costliest segment in data breaches worldwide, with 1.63 U.S. dollars on average. The cost for lost business ranked second, while response following a breach came across as the third-costliest segment.

In 2022, nearly 85 percent of Poles stated a person should change the password of a leaked website. Meanwhile, 60 percent of Poles indicated that it should be reported to the police.