On March 21, 2017, Attorney General Schneiderman announced that his office received a record number of data breach notices in 2016. Around 1,300 data breaches were reported in 2016. This represented a 60% increase over the previous year; these breaches exposed the personal records of 1.6 million New Yorkers in 2016.
Hacking represented the leading cause of all data breaches from 2006 to 2013. In 2016 hacking accounted for more than 40% of data security breaches.
According to the AG press release, employee negligence (a combination of inadvertent exposure of records, insider wrongdoing, and loss of devices) accounted for approximately 37% of breaches.
The most frequently acquired information in 2016 was Social Security numbers and financial account information, which together accounted for 81% of breaches in New York. Other records such as driver’s license numbers (8%), date of birth (7%) and password/account information (2%) together accounted for 1,284,037 of exposed personal records in 2016.
The press release by Attorney General Schneiderman is available at https://ag.ny.gov…
Originally published on Technethics on May 2017