Topic summary
Data breaches
Extracted from the Wikipedia article Data breach.
Prevalence
Before the widespread adoption of data breach notification laws around 2005, the prevalence of data breaches is difficult to determine. Even afterwards, annual statistics may be unreliable because breaches are sometimes reported years after they occur, or not at all. Nevertheless, the statistics show a continued increase in the number and severity of data breaches that continues as of 2022. In 2016, researcher Sasha Romanosky estimated that data breaches (excluding phishing) outnumbered other security breaches by a factor of four.