Nearly 1,600 data breaches occurred in the United States in 2017, breaking the annual record of 1,093 that was set just last year. The number of compromised data records, of which 88 percent included Social Security Numbers and 8 percent included payment card numbers, increased to nearly 180 million, the highest total since 2009.
The featured chart shows the number of data breaches that occurred and the total number of records compromised each year from 2009 to 2017 as reported by the ITRC. While there is a clear upward trend in the number of data breaches over this time, the number of compromised data records fluctuates greatly. This is particularly true over the past three years, when stolen data records ballooned to 169 million in 2015 before falling to 36.6 million in 2016, and then increasing nearly five-fold in 2017.
