[Infowarrior] - Report: US leads world in data breaches

[Richard Forno]

Report: US leads world in data breaches

By Joe Uchill - 01/25/17 10:10 AM EST 

http://thehill.com/policy/cybersecurity/316034-united-states-leads-world-in-data-breaches

The United States led the world in data breaches last year by a large margin, according to an analysis released Wednesday.

Nearly half, 47.5 percent, of announced data breaches in 2016 that exposed user data — and 68.2 percent of breached records — came from the U.S., according to Risk Based Security’s annual data breach report.

With nearly 2,000 breaches, the U.S. had almost 10 times as many incidents as its next-closest competitor, the United Kingdom, which had 203.

From those breaches, U.S. organizations lost more than 2.9 billion total user records, more than 10 times as many records as second-place Russia.

The statistics are padded from two record-breaking breaches announced at Yahoo of 500 million and 1 billion records, the two largest known breaches of all time. 

Without the Yahoo breaches, the U.S. still leads Russia in breached records, but only by a 5-to-1 margin. 

Across the world, it was a rough year for breaches. Risk Based Security calculates that the top four breaches of all time — and eight of the top 20 — all happened in 2016.