Business News

Top industries subject to data breaches

NEW YORK - The industries most likely to lose data in breaches are online companies, government bodies and healthcare companies, shows a new study.

The study, conducted by IT asset disposition and data destruction experts IT Asset Management Group (IT-AMG), analyzed major data breaches that have been registered since 2004 to discover which industry is most prone to losing data.

Online companies come in first, as since 2004 there have been 150 data breaches within the sector, for a rough total of more than 8.1 billion records lost. That accounts for 27.8% of every major breach recorded, over one in four. The typical incident in the sector exposed 11,500,000 records, the highest median of any industry analysed, while the average sat far higher still at 54,259,574, a sign of how heavily a handful of enormous leaks skew the picture.

The largest breach in the sector was suffered by LinkedIn in 2021, when data belonging to hundreds of millions of users was scraped and offered for sale online, including names, email addresses, phone numbers and workplace details.

Second on the list is government, with 63 data breaches accounting for 11.7% of all incidents recorded, and a total of over 2.8 billion records. The gap between the sector’s median breach of 1,700,000 records and its average of 44,794,364 is the starkest in the study: most public sector incidents are modest, but the outliers are vast.

The biggest of those was the National Public Data breach of 2024, in which billions of records held by a background check firm, including names, addresses and social security numbers, were exposed and later circulated freely.

The healthcare industry comes in third, with 56 data breaches for a total of almost 427 million records lost, or 10.4% of all breaches recorded. Healthcare has the second lowest median breach size in the top 10 at 1,061,604 records, but its sheer frequency keeps it near the top of the table.

Within the industry, the biggest incident was the 2024 UnitedHealth breach, which disrupted healthcare payments across the United States and exposed the personal and medical information of a substantial share of the American population.

Telecoms is worth noting as the outlier of the study: with just 30 breaches it ranks seventh by frequency, yet its average breach size of 67,668,591 records is the largest of any sector, driven by incidents such as the 2022 Indonesian SIM card leak.

Together, the 10 sectors account for close to 17.9 billion lost records.

Richy George, Chief Revenue Officer of IT Asset Management Group (IT-AMG), commented on the findings: “What stands out from the data is the sheer gap between median and average breach sizes in sectors like government and telecoms, which tells us that when public sector breaches happen, they tend to be catastrophic in scale.

“What these numbers also show is how long data lives. Records lost a decade ago are still in circulation today, and the same is true of information sitting on retired laptops, servers and drives that organizations no longer think about.”

IT Asset Management Group’s website is https://www.itamg.com/.