From Bitcoin robberies to LinkedIn email and password leaks, data has been breached left and right in 2016.
It’s easy for them all to get lost in the shuffle, desensitizing us to the sheer number of instances wherein personal information was stolen or improperly protected this year. Thankfully the IT Governance Blog, an internet watchdog site dealing with cybersecurity, has compiled all of the data breaches of the year to get a rough, optimistic number of how many records were leaked in 2016. Their number is a very reasonable, not-at-all-terrifying 1.6 billion records.
That’s up from 480 million breaches in 2015, and it’s an optimistic number. It doesn’t include one of the biggest breach stories of the year, the 500 million records Yahoo revealed had been stolen in 2014. After all those leaks were in 2014. But if you include those leaks, the number of breached records we found out about in 2016 is 2,154,135,541. And as the Yahoo story taught us, that’s just the ones we know about.
The worst months for breaches this year were November and June. June saw 289,150,000 records exposed, including 154 million voters whose information got out due to a database breach. November, however, proved to be the worst month for security, with 456,403,757 million people being breached. Over 412 million of those were accounts from adult websites, including 15 million accounts that had previously been deleted.
IT Governance has listed the worst breaches by each month, but if you head to their site and click on the number of breaches for each month it will give you a complete list of every known breach from that month. Maybe you’ll discover one you didn’t know about. Until then take solace in the fact that if this keeps up, no one will have any privacy to worry about.