The biggest data breaches in 2024: 1 billion stolen records and rising
You’re not imagining things if you think it feels like there have been more notifications about hacks or victims of data breaches lately.
The number of data breach victims has surpassed 1 billion for the first half of 2024, according to the Identity Theft Resource Center.
That’s a 409% increase from the same time period last year: 1.07 billion victims compared to 182.65 million in the first half of 2023.
A majority of the victims were from compromises announced or updated in the most recent quarter: 1.04 billion new victims in the second quarter compared to 37.68 million in the first quarter, according to the San Diego, California-based nonprofit organization’s latest Data Breach Report for the first half of 2024.
“The takeaway from this report is simple: Every person, business, institution and government agency must view data and identity protection with a greater sense of urgency,” Eva Velasquez, president and CEO of the Identity Theft Resource Center said in a press release.
How did we get to 1 billion data breach victims?
Last year was already record-breaking for data companies, but the trends from the first half of this year have shown a major jump in victims, said Identity Theft Resource Center’s Chief Operating Officer James E. Lee.
“While the victim count is eye-popping, keep in mind this includes people who are impacted by more than one breach,” Lee told USA TODAY.
“Also, about 1 billion of the victims are related to a handful of mega-breaches such as Ticketmaster and Advanced Auto Parts but do not include a victim count from the Change Healthcare supply chain attack since none have been reported yet,” he said referring to a breach announced in February of a subsidiary of United Healthcare that processes one-third of all U.S. patient health records.
There was also a 23% increase in stolen driver’s license information in the first half of 2024 compared to the same period in 2023, Lee said.
While a small number of data breaches with very large numbers of victims skew the numbers, there was still an increase in data compromises, the ID Theft Center said.
There were 1,571 data breaches reported in the first half of 2024, a 14% increase compared to the same period last year. 2023 also set a record for data events reports in a single year with 3,203 breaches.
“It’s fair to say that the trends we saw in 2023 that led to a record-high number of compromises in a single year are continuing and some are accelerating, like the increase in stolen driver’s license information,” he said. “Consumers need to be hyper-vigilant in practicing good cyber-hygiene and make sure their loved ones are too.”
