Dive Brief:
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The number of data breaches reported in California increased 28% from 2012 to 2013, and another 30% in the first 10 months of this year, according to a report by the state’s attorney general, Kamala D. Harris.
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Two retail breaches alone, at Target and LivingSocial, put some 7.5 million California residents’ data at risk, Harris said. Breaches at retailers accounted for the vast majority of records compromised: 15.4 million records, or 84% of the total. Financial services companies were second, with 20%.
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A little more than half (53%) of the data breaches were intentional hacks. Those hacks hit 93% of the 17 million records that were leaked in California in 2013. 1.15 million records were at risk due to physical loss or misplacement of a computer or device, according to the report. Alarmingly, Social Security numbers were the information most often compromised.
Dive Insight:
California, with an economy equivalent to the world’s eighth largest, has taken the time and effort to assess the effect of data breaches on its citizens — and it’s not pretty. The information is a warning, especially to retailers, which suffered by far the most hacks and whose breaches compromised the information of millions of Californians. Based on the massive increase in cybercrime in the last couple of years, retailers and their customers will continue to see more hacks unless significant steps are taken, according to Harris.
“We are increasingly adopting technology that is putting our data in systems that are ripe for penetration,” Harris said. “We have not sufficiently inoculated ourselves. The bad guys have figured out where the vulnerabilities are and learned there is much to be profited and gained from exploiting them.”